Category Archives: Inventory

Five Common Inventory Management Mistakes from Demand Solutions

Demand Solutions recently released a white paper on managing inventory for optimal advantage (registration required) that overviewed 10 common inventory mistakes and how to correct them. Of these, the following five can cost an organization dearly if not corrected.

  • Forecast Management without a Process

    All stakeholders have to agree on the process and the forecast that results and someone needs to own the process to insure it’s implemented properly. Otherwise the budget will be padded and the end result will be obsolete inventory and associated losses.

  • Not Talking to Customers

    Good inventory management is more than just the right volume, it’s the right volume at the right time in the right place. Be sure to understand what is driving customer replenishment patterns to insure that production is synched to customer needs. Otherwise, inventory can build up for months at a time, which will incur additional storage costs.

  • Forcing the Budget

    Don’t overlay the budget on top of the sales forecast. Both are approximations and both need to change to reflect reality. Attempting to synch them will result in production patterns that don’t match actual demands.

  • Too Many SKUs in Too Many Places

    This greatly decreases warehouse efficiency and increases fulfillment costs.

  • Never Trying New Things

    New technology provides better capability for ongoing, collaborative improvement. Avoiding new technology will limit operational efficiency and cost savings opportunities.

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From the Brink to Cash in the Bank – Supply Chain Management Can Save You Too

The SCMR is back, Quinn is still in charge, and it looks like he’s striving to maintain the quality that the SCMR was known for. I was quite impressed with one of the first articles on driving a turnaround in tumultouos times, which presented a case study on PolyOne and how it came back from the brink of bankruptcy. In March of 2009, it’s share price reached an abysmal low of $1.32. On May 27, it was $10.19. That’s an eightfold improvement in a little over a year and the reason analysts are now recommending it as a buy.

In the past year, it generated $218 Million of free cash flow and reduced its net debt by $233 Million. This is very significant given that it’s sales in 2009 were only 2.061 Billion as it means that PolyOne not only freed up 10% of their total sales for working capital but also managed to direct over 10% of their total sales to reduce their net debt. Plus, not only is their long term debt only 60% of what it was in 2005, but they went from a net loss of 273 Million in 2008 (when sales were 33% higher) to a net income of 68 Million in 2009, an incredible turnaround.

So how did they do this? Great supply chain management. Specifically:

  • Manufacturing RealignmentA series of mergers and acquisitions left PolyOne with over 40 global production facilities, considerably more than it needed to meet demand and mitigate risk. A detailed network analysis indicated that they could more than meet demand and mitigate risk with only 80% of manufacturing capability. This allowed them to close nine production facilities and significantly decrease operating costs.
  • Inventory ReductionAt the end of the third quarter in 2008, the company was carrying $331 Million in inventory, a number equal to 16% of sales in 2009 and an incredible cost. They undertook a two-day Kaizen event to identify opportunities to reduce inventory and cash-to-cash cycle times that identified consignment inventory reductions, opportunities to reduce costs by way of distributors, better inventory transfer practices with key suppliers, and opportunities to improve reorder points. Specifically the first thing they did was kill the re-order points that were on autopilot in the SAP MRP, which didn’t reflect the plummet in demand that came with the economic downturn. Moving to regular, manual review, helped them reduce inventory by $139 Million in just six months.
  • Process ImprovementsThrough numerous process improvements that included inventory stratification, PolyOne also reduced DSI, which dropped from 55 days in first quarter to 37 days in third quarter, while improving on-time delivery.
  • Greater Customer FocusManagement established the mindset that on-time delivery was critical and by improving customer focus, PolyOne improved on-time delivery from 81% in 2005 to 93% in 2009, a 15% improvement.

In short, it was supply chain that saved the day, and its the best practices described in this blog that will get you there. Get a strategy, manage your finances, lean your supply chain, improve your forecasts, optimize your inventory, analyze your opportunities, adopt e-Sourcing, and optimize your awards and you too can go from a net loss of 10% to a net income of 3% literally overnight, on your way to becoming a best in class supply chain company.

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b-Pack: Packing It In for A Brave New World, Part III

Two weeks ago, in Part I, we told you how b-pack, hot on the heels of Ivalua, had decided to cross the Atlantic and join in the conquest to bring the bohemian revolution to the world of Procurement and P2P with their extensive solution suite that actually closes the P2P loop. Then, last week in Part II, we expounded on a few additional capabilities, which are relatively unique in the marketplace, that extended the basic value offering beyond what a standard P2P application delivers. Today, we’re going to dive into a few more value-adds, some of which are also relatively unique in the marketplace. But first, a recap of the story to date.

In Part I we described the base b-pack platform that takes you from the start of a traditional sourcing cycle (RFx), through a contract, to a requisition (which may be from a catalog), against a budget, to receipt of the goods (which can include asset tracking information), and the invoice, to payment, reporting, and supplier management. We dove into the basic P2P cycle and covered the requisition, approval, receipt, invoice, matching, payment, and reporting cycle in detail as well as the solution delivery options that are available to you.

Then, in Part II we detailed some of the integrated applications that build out the core capabilities to also provide the organization with expense and travel management, asset management, dispute resolution, and procurement business intelligence reporting.

Today, we’re going to address inventory management and its integration with asset management, budget management, fleet management, and internationalization. Then, in the fourth and final post of this initial series, we’ll tackle some of the advanced invoice management and viewing capabilities, document management, administration, and the supplier portal.

Inventory management, which is tightly integrated with asset management, allows you to track not only how much product you have at each (warehouse) location, but where the product is stored. The tool can handle multiple locations, which can each belong to a different (management) company, multiple rooms at each location, and assign multiple departments, managers, and clerks to each room. In addition to tracking the products (and counts) in each room, it can also track all of the inventory moves associated with each product into, within, and out of the warehouse. Like any good inventory management system, it allows for the creation of manual and automatic replenishment orders, which generate purchase orders against existing contracts and which are pushed through the appropriate approval channels if desired. The replenishment workflow is detailed and allows for multiple states, including fill, approval, standby, warehouse, in order, received, and shelved (put away) states. Finally, in addition to the basic inventory, asset, budget, and catalogue information, the user can also define custom fields, notes, and documents to track against each item.

Budget management is very powerful and allows the user to define budgets at the invoicing company, department, or user level and assign them to a manager and a chief. Each budget can be assigned a budget code, a group code, and a cost centre for accounting purposes and the administrator can define individual purchase authorizations, monthly purchase authorizations, and / or annual purchase authorizations. Approvals can be against global budget amounts, monthly budget amounts, individual purchase amounts, or always and automatic rejection rules can be defined for requests that are obviously unreasonable against the budget. Finally, budgets can be rolled up for reporting purposes.

Fleet management, their newest module, was built at the request of a customer who wanted a way to track their fleet vehicles in a manner that was tightly integrated with asset management and invoice management (to insure that vehicles were properly tracked, serviced, and that payments were at contracted rates). It lets you quickly retrieve vehicle records, fuel utilization statistics, and maintenance contracts and allows you do define alerts based on (fixed) budget utilization, kilometres, taxes, department utilization, preventative maintenance rules, and suspect expenses (with respect to predefined rules). It comes with a number of built-in reports, including total vehicles by type (gas, diesel, hybrid, electric), owned vs. leased summary, manufacturers and lessors, and make and is integrated into their global reporting engine that allows you to create your own reports. For each vehicle, it tracks the original order information, unique asset ID, VIN, type, category (sedan, SUV, truck, etc.), manufacturer, manufacturing location, make, description, grey card info, kilometrages, financing information, insurance information, fuel consumption, service history, maintenance schedule, trip history, and costs per kilometer as well as the division, department, and manager it is assigned to — and every field is searchable to allow you to quickly find the record(s) of interest. The detail of information that is tracked allows for a very deep analysis which will not only tell you which vehicles are the most expensive to operate, but why (fuel, insurance, service, etc.). This will allow you to make much better fleet decisions in the future.

With respect to internationalization, not only is the product multi-lingual and multi-currency, but the tool includes an integrated translation feature that allows text to be translated, automatically, between English, French, and a few other European languages. The buyer can define which currencies are supported, which countries they are supported for, the display properties, associated tax rates (at the country and state level), the conversion rates, and the (auto) update rules (when and from what data source).

In summary, b-pack provides a comprehensive P2P e-Procurement solution that also includes some very useful capabilities above and beyond the basic procurement cycle requirements that can provide significant additional value to many buying organizations, including the inventory management, budget management, and fleet management capabilities described in this post.

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The IFRS is Coming – Is Your Supply Chain Ready?

That’s right, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) could be replacing the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) at your US headquarters in as little as four years with the current proposals on the table. And since you have to maintain double books for a year (in GAAP and IFRS) before you switch over, to make sure you have a good handle on the new rules, that means your new IFRS-friendly systems have to be in place in less than three years. Which means your people have to be trained in less than two years … especially since major exams, like the CPA, will start testing on IFRS material in 2012. (And when you consider that the EU has been using IFRS for five years now, and that over 120 countries have already adopted it, it’s about time that North America caught up. Canada catches up next year, and Mexico follows suit in 2012.)

The IFRS has a number of changes in store for supply chain management, including these four outlined in this recent ISM article on the “accounting changes ahead”:

  • Last In, First OutIFRS does not permit inventory to be valued using LIFO. This can have significant tax consequences.
  • Inventory ValuationUnder IFRS, the inventory valuation you use must reflect current market price.
  • Long-Term ContractsUnder IFRS, when you take possession of inventory, you take responsibility for it and it must be reported on financial statements.
  • Management ResponsibilityThe responsibility of management with respect to data collection and reporting is much greater under IFRS.

The complete overhaul of systems that will be required at many companies could make SOX look like a walk in the park. If you haven’t yet figured out how it’s going to affect your organization, better find an expert sooner rather than later.

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MCA Solutions – Bringing the Aftermarket Forward, Part II

In Part I, we re-introduced you to MCA Solutions, a Philadelphia, PA company that specializes in after market service (and service parts) optimization, and noted that they were still going strong despite some recent shake-ups in the market (and the noteable acquisition of Servigistics and Click Commerce by Marlin Equity Partners, who also acquired Emptoris not too long ago). We noted that, in addition to completing a strong SAP integration, they’ve also added a considerable amount of new functionality in the last two years around reporting, plan analysis, and reporting management.

Since we covered their new reporting and plan analysis solution in the last part, today we’re going to cover their performance management solution. Since you can’t manage what you can’t measure, and the best way to measure is often with a balanced scorecard, it’s based on scorecards, but since managers don’t like columns of numbers, it’s implemented using a dashboard, but since MCA agrees with me that traditional dashboards are inherently dangerous and dysfunctional, they realized that the only way the application would be truly useful was if it clearly identified not what was right, but what was wrong (since a goal of after-market service is exception-based management so that you only expend resources where needed). More importantly, the scorecard dashboard would only be useful if it allowed you to quickly discern what was wrong and do something about it. So what MCA built is a dashboard scorecard that not only highlights any metric that is out of bounds in red, but an interactive graphical scorecard that allows you to drill down into the metric retrieve all of the data associated with that metric in a single click.

Just like you can drill into a spend cube, you can drill into any metric on the scorecard. The first level drill will bring up all of the metrics the high level dashboard is composed of, and highlight which metrics are a problem. You can then drill into those metrics and bring up all of the associated raw data. So, if you brought up the scorecard and saw on-time delivery was only 80%, when anything under 90% is unacceptable, you could drill in and see the problem ports are LA and New Orleans and that San Diego, Washington, Vancouver, Boston, and Halifax were all meeting or exceeding their on-time delivery targets. You could drill in again and see that at these ports, most of the late deliveries were from West Coast Warblers and East Cost Easies and instantly know that either these suppliers have performance problems or that you’re not allowing them enough time in your inventory network design to transport the parts require to replenish your North American stock from your foreign suppliers. But since you can also drill into the application and the underlying model associated with any part, location, or supplier you can quickly determine if it’s a performance problem or a network design flaw. For instance, lets say you only allow 14 days for replenishment of goods in your LA warehouses from Shenzhen. Considering that sailing time is typically 12-15 days, and that it probably takes at least a day to get your goods unloaded at the port, and another for them to clear customs, get loaded onto the truck, and transported to your warehouse, there’s no way you’re going to get that part in less than 14 days by sea and it’s probably going to take at least 17 days on average, especially if these carriers are running slower ships. Then you know you need to adjust your model, and measure the supplier against a more reasonable delivery time. But if you are allowing 21 days, and your third party carrier is consistently late, then you have a supplier performance problem.

Moreover, the scorecard dashboard is completely customizeable. Each component is actually a dashboard report, and with their new flexible reporting capability, you can build any report you want. So you can design the dashboard to focus only on reporting problems. That way you can ignore the 90% of your network that is running smoothly and dive right into the 10% that isn’t running right, analyze the situation, revise the model, analyze the revision, implement an improvement, and see if the situation improves over time. If not, you can dive right in and try again. And if everything looks too good, you can define more metrics, more sanity checks, and find new problems to work on. Which is precisely what an actionable scorecard should allow you to do!

And your suppliers in China and Japan can use it too. The product is double-byte Unicode compliant and, in addition to a number of European languages, has also been translated into Mandarin and Japanese. With these recent improvements, you should be able to plug it right into your follow-the-sun operation and, once it’s configured and your data is complete, close the loop on your end-to-end after market service (parts) operation.

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