Identify Inventory Reduction Opportunities within Weeks

Identify Inventory Reduction
Opportunities within Weeks
www.oco-inc.com Executive Summary
In today's tough economic times, manufacturing companies are looking to free up cash and leverage working capital. Priorities include balancing inventory across the network, optimizing inventory management processes, improving inventory turns, and driving customer on-time deliveries and fill rates, with the goal of reducing overall investment in inventory.
Inventory managers are faced with difficult problems such as determining the appropriate level of stock, the proper stocking methodology, how fulfillment sources perform relative to quoted delivery, and whether business users have full visibility into their operations to make knowledgeable decisions. Often the decisions are made by trying to pull data from multiple systems, but companies struggle with extracting, reporting, and incorporating the data into one source. Inventory managers are spending nights and weekends wrestling with spreadsheets to find out where inventory resides and how much can be moved around the network. Thus, companies cannot obtain timely, accurate, and comprehensive data in a quick and efficient manner.
While it is widely recognized that technology can help alleviate supply chain issues, the problem many businesses face lies in choosing the right technology for their company and their needs. Fortunately, there are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Business Intelligence (BI) solutions available that can help address these issues. SaaS BI solutions:
. Complement and leverage existing inventory management, parts planning and transactional systems;. Help identify inventory reduction opportunities in a short period of time;. Can be delivered in as few as 6 to 10 weeks and are very affordable;. Deliver high user satisfaction, a compelling ROI, and significant business benefits;. Place minimal demands on IT and business users.
SaaS BI reporting and analytics solutions provides significant value to companies struggling to effectively manage their supply chain while ensuring they are making decisions based on facts and not unreliable data. By using SaaS BI solutions, businesses can uncover significant inventory reduction and other cost-saving opportunities within weeks.
Page 2 www.oco-inc.comIntroduction and Overview
Supply chain inventory challenges in today's manufacturing and industrial companies are complex with multiple constituents and competing parameters. Customers require faster and more consistent delivery times; corporate working capital mandates necessitate faster parts velocity with better turns; and reverse logistics and escalating transportation costs require optimized parts flow and stocking locations.
Within service and MRO organizations, spare parts inventory challenges are even more demanding given the variability both in demand and customer operating environments. In addition, the proliferation of Performance Based Logistics (PBL's) and long-term asset utilization-based service contracts require Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and service providers to assume more of the delivery risk and total parts management responsibility.
While it is widely agreed that technology can help facilitate this data intensive problem, the challenge is selecting and deploying the right technology. The focus of this paper will be on the value that an effective business intelligence reporting and analytics solution can have. We will summarize some specific supply chain pain points, provide a view of what an effective Business Intelligence (BI) solution should look like, and finally, illustrate how to uncover significant inventory reduction opportunities within weeks using an example from a recent customer experience.
Today's Challenges & Opportunities
As noted above, the supply chain process is complex and dynamic. The inventory manager is faced with a number of critical, and often conflicting, decisions and questions such as:
. What is the proper level of stock to assure service level agreements (SLAs) while simultaneously meeting inventory turns metrics? . What is the appropriate stocking methodology - forward deployment closer to the customer or a more centralized warehouse approach - to optimize performance?. Do our planners have access to the right data to facilitate their order decisions?. How are fulfillment sources - both internal manufac... [download for more]