Monthly Archives: March 2014

Is MRO Inventory Bogging You Down? Maybe You Need a Bit of Xtivity? Part I

Inventory optimization is tough, but maintenance, repair, and operations inventory management is even tougher because the parts just sit there until they are needed — and sometimes, either due to proper maintenance or just good luck, the critical part you are stockpiling for your production line sits on the shelf three times longer than expected while other times the critical part has to be replaced twice as often as the vendor who sold you the machine told you it would have to be.

The last thing you want to do is get the stock levels wrong because inventory is expensive. In addition to the capital that is tied up in the inventory, there are the facility storage costs (which include rent, overhead expenses for services like security, and property taxes) and the possession costs that include, but are not limited to, clerical costs (to track the inventory), insurance (to insure the inventory as a whole), theft (as the insurance policy will have a deductible and a maximum claim), taxes (when the organization takes possession), deterioration (as some inventory will get damaged or spoil), depreciation (as most components decrease in value over time), and obsolescence (if the inventory cannot be used in time). Having inventory sit idle is very costly.

To make matters worse, many of these parts are very expensive and often have no residual value if unused. Whereas unpopular consumer packaged goods can often be sold at fire-sale prices which will allow you to recover some of their cost, this is not always so with MRO. This is because the parts are typically only useable within a particular machine on your production line and by the time you shut it down, chances are that the supplier is no longer selling the machine and most of the suppliers’ other customers are no longer using the machine as well. In addition, many MRO parts and supplies, especially in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and high-tech industries, have specific storage requirements (cool, dry, etc.) and this makes the storage cost even pricier than for regular (consumer) goods.

With typical inventory carrying cost eating up approximately 25% to 40% of a company’s annual inventory investment, the last thing you want is too much inventory, especially since certain MRO categories with special storage requirements and a high risk of obsolescence can have amortized inventory carrying costs that are close to the total value of the inventory! Unless you like having millions tied up in inventory, you need to make sure that you optimize your MRO inventory to the best of your ability. If you can’t do that, don’t rely on creativity — that won’t be enough because just one wrong JIT (Just in Time) decision can bring your entire production line down for days and cost you Millions of dollars. If you don’t have a suitable platform and the expertise in house, don’t rely on creativity. Apply a little Xtivity instead.

If Even a Canadian TelCo Can Use Payables to Add $3 Million To Their Bottom Line

Imagine what your company could do with invoice automation. As per this recent article over on Shared Services Link on how to turn payables into an opportunity and add $3M to your bottom line, Telus, a 10 Billion telecommunication products and services provider which typically receives 15,000 to 20,000 paper invoices per month, implemented a supplier portal, electronic invoicing, and a dynamic discounting solution that allows them to save 3 Million annually.

When you consider that 10 Billion is big, but not that big these days, that a lot of organizations receive 15,000 to 20,000 paper invoices a month, or more, and that a supplier portal is pretty primitive from an automated invoicing viewpoint, you quickly see that there is quite a lot of opportunity for your organization to save quite a lot of money from invoice processing. In some organizations, the overhead alone from manual processing exceeds a million dollars, and this barely covers a detailed review of 10% to 20% of the invoices. Proper automation insures m-way matching on 100% of invoices with exception-based processing on the 10% to 15% that contain issues or errors.

You see, when you implement the right invoice automation solution:

  • 98%+ of all invoices flow through the system,
  • 99%+ of all errors are caught,
  • 90%+ of all invoices are automatically processed without human intervention, and
  • 80%+ process savings are realized and maintained.

And then, instead of spending $30 to $40 to process an single invoice, you’ll be spending $3 to $4. So, if your organization is processing 10,000 invoices a month, you’ll see your overhead costs drop about $300,000 and you’ll save upwards of 3 Million a year before dynamic discounting or other supply chain financing solutions are put into the mix!

For more information on how your organization can save 3 Million, download Sourcing Innovation’s recent white-paper on An End-to-End Invoice Automation Framework – Ten Keys to Success (registration required), sponsored by Nipendo.

Top 12 Challenges Facing India in the Decades Ahead – 04 – Behavioural and Social Norms & Castes

As we have demonstrated in the last 9 posts, India has some serious challenges ahead of it. And despite the severity of the challenges like education, health care, and even sanitation, it has even bigger challenges still. The first of these, that we will address in this post, is the social norms.

The first challenge is with the general populace. For example, as Dreze & Sen chronicled in An Uncertain Glory, if asked, due to the fact that there is a model (if not an effective one) for bringing public health care to the rural areas and a growing private industry where you can presumably get what you need when you need it (if you can pay for it), most Indians believe they have reasonable access to health care. Given the considerable number of deaths from infection, the very high citizen to physician ratio, and the average number of people each health care center needs to serve, this is not the case. Secondly, due to the lack of progress on education, and the fact that 10 years after the first PROBE study there is still a significant lack of teaching days, there is obviously an opinion that the education being received by the average Indian child is adequate, which is a perception that is far from reality. There should not only be an uproar about the lack of teachers in some districts (as one per school clearly is not enough given the size of India’s population), but also an uproar that these highly paid individuals are absent 20%+ of the time!

The second challenge is with the government. The government doesn’t want to tackle tough issues, and certainly doesn’t want to take any steps that might cause a considerable backlash from any group of a significant size. Plus, if you look at the relative spending on health care and education in India versus other BRIC countries (Source: World Bank), total spending in India on health care (including the private sector) is a mere 3.9% versus 5.2% in China and 8.9% in Brazil, largely due to the fact that the public sector spend on health care is 1.2% of GDP compared to China’s 2.7% of GDP. If you look at Education, India spends a mere 3.1% (Source: Wikipedia) compared to China’s 3.9% (Source: Xinhuanet) and Brazil’s 5.1%. India is not adequately spending to address it’s most fundamental problems.

Government spending in India for 2013 is estimated at 302 Billion USD while revenues are projected to be 210 Billion USD. While that’s not a lot considering that India has over 1.2 Billion people, it’s still enough to do something. So where is the Indian Government spending its money? If you look at the Budget at a Glance as posted on the Government of India Site, over 1/3rd (37%) of the non-capital non-plan expenditures, which constitute almost 60% of projected expenditures, are going to interest payments and prepayment premium (370,684 crore of 992,908). The next biggest category (at 23%) is subsidies (231,084 crore of 992,908). The third biggest category (at 12%) is defence services (116,931 crore of 992,908). Grants make up 8%, pensions 7%, and the police make up 4%. The budget is rounded out by economic services at 2.4%, general services at 2.3%, and social services at a whopping 2.3%. (Taking us to 98.5% of the budget.) The remaining categories consisting of the postal deficit, the NDRF (National Disaster Relief Fund), union territory expenditures, and foreign government grants collectively amount to about 1.5%. Of the plan expenditures, all of the non-capital expenditures (27%) go towards the central plan and central assistance. In other-words, relatively speaking, India is spending too much on servicing its debt, paying its pensions, and defending its country and not nearly enough on education, health-care, and other economic assistance to lift the majority of its population out of near-poverty — a population it needs educated and healthy to take on China.

The third is with the media. As per Dreze & Sen’s An Uncertain Glory, among more than five thousand articles published on the editorial pages of India’s leading English-medium dailies during the last six months of 2012, less than 1% of the total editorial space was dedicated to health-related matters, and that was with a very broad definition of “health-related matter”. As we will discuss in more detail in a future post, the media really needs to spend more time on critical issues like health care, sanitation, and education.

The Best Leadership Lesson

Brought to you by one of the greatest Comedians ever. John Cleese, in his recent Life’s Work interview by Adi Ignatius (and available on HBR.org), defines a true leader.

In the book Life and How to Survive It, which I developed with Robin Skynner, we decided that the ideal leader was the one who was trying to make himself dispensable. In other words, he was helping the people around him acquire as many of his skills as possible so he could let everyone else do the work and just keep an eye on things, minimizing his job and the chaos that would come with a transfer of authority.

‘Nuff said.