Category Archives: Inventory

MCA Solutions – Bringing the Aftermarket Forward, Part I

MCA Solutions, a Philadelphia, PA company that specializes in after market service (and service parts) optimization, is still going strong despite the recent struggles of a few of its direct competitors (namely Click Commerce and Servigistics who were recently acquired by Marlin Equity Partners). If anything, the recession (although it did considerably lengthen the sales cycle) only bolstered the need for after market service (as no one could afford new equipment) and optimization thereof (as everyone is strapped for cash and every penny counts).

As I indicated in my first post on MCA Solutions and their strategic service parts management platform, many large manufacturing, semiconductor, high-tech, aerospace, defense, and oil & gas companies often have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars tied up in inventory in their attempts to meet specified service levels, and every dollar in inventory costs them money in overhead. Since many of these companies typically have 10% to 20% more inventory than they need, they’re tying up tens of millions of dollars in working capital needlessly as well as throwing away millions of dollars in inventory holding costs — a situation which is easily remedied by a service level optimization platform that can optimize your multi-echelon parts inventory storage network such that your contracted service levels are met but your costs are minimized. Furthermore, as per the value of after market service in a down economy, done right, this optimization will also improve cash flow by roughly 10%, reduce inventory by 15% to 50%, and even improve service levels by 5% to 20%.

Since the last time I covered MCA in depth, which was almost two years ago, they’ve made a number of significant enhancements to their platform, the most notable being flex reporting, performance management, and plan analysis. Of these, flex reporting and plan analysis excite me the most, because the former lets you construct any report you can imagine (if you’re willing to write some SQL*) and the latter lets you build, optimize, and compare as many what-if scenarios as you want, which is the (one of the) most powerful feature(s) of any good optimization platform.

Their plan analysis tool not only allows you to define your service parts strategy (fill rates, inventory/investment caps, number of echelons to consider simultaneously in stock planning, etc.) and run an analysis on that strategy (to determine total cost and inventory distribution), and not only allows you to compare one strategy against another (how much do I save by sacrificing 1% of fill rate? how does inventory distribution change? etc.), but also allows you to define a rules-based sanity check that can be run against every model and the resulting inventory solution. For example, if the inventory levels change by more than 20%, the overall investment changes by more than 10%, shortages or excesses at any location exceed pre-defined maximums, etc., the product will immediately warn you that the new model might not be an acceptable replacement over the current one. Also, each of these rules can be defined by location, SKU (or family), or segment (or lane), which gives you a lot of flexibility in your analysis and sanity checks. (Other checks can include replacement rate, forecasting model [parameters], export mode, horizon, manual overrides, time factors, intermittence, thresholds, and other relevant measures tracked and/or computed by the platform.) Furthermore, they’ve also added the ability to generate plans by Average Customer Wait Times, which is becoming important in aerospace and defense, oil and gas, and other sectors where you have equipment that can’t be unavailable for more than a very short amount of time and service (availability) levels aren’t good enough.

While we’re talking analysis, they’ve also added a new multi-period budget report which is a system generated report that is very useful as it not only calculates total forecast, condemnation forecast, repair forecast, overall metrics, TSL, average inventory position, scheduled demand, new buy, and cost across your entire operation to anywhere between 12 and 36 months in the future, but does so using a successive series of automated optimizations where the output of one period is used as the input to the next. It will take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours to run, but it clearly allows you to see the long term effects of any change to your aftermarket service (parts) strategy.

In the next post, we’ll talk about their new performance management solution.

* Yes, I’ll admit that I’m not your average user but I have to applaud them for acknowledging their expertise is not in the creation of report builders, that no set of canned reports, no matter how extensive, will please everyone, and that the right thing to do is expose the schema and let power users do what they want — which isn’t dangerous when you also give them the ability to make as many copies (partial or full) of the database as they want and to mess around with the copies, and not the production data.

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SYSPRO: Forecasting and Inventory Optimization for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses, Part II

In Part I, we covered the inventory forecasting solution for SMBs contained in the new SYSPRO 6.1 solution suite, which is built on the Microsoft .NET platform and which is (tightly) integrated with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products. We concluded that the forecasting solution, which allows you to create forecasts and the product family / grouping level as well as the SKU level, is quite robust and extensive for an SMB offering, as well as being quite easy to use, and left off noting that it provides the foundation for a true inventory optimization solution that is newly available from SYSPRO in SYSPRO 6.1.

Today we’re going to cover their new inventory optimization solution. Since I am assuming you read my recent posts on the Basics of Inventory Management and the Basics of Inventory Optimization, I’m not going to repeat them and dive right into an overview of the SYSPRO product.

The SYSPRO inventory optimization solution starts with a forecast and current stock levels, your storage (warehouse) network, and your inventory policies and produces an optimal inventory plan that will minimize your inventory requirements, and, thus, your corresponding inventory costs. The key to optimizing your costs in the SYSPRO tool is the definition of an appropriate inventory policy for each product family and/or SKU and the accurate definition of relevant warehouse information regarding stock levels and associated costs.

For each product family and/or SKU, you define the lead time, any necessary gross requirements or batching rules, the economic batch (order) quantity, and any maximum inventory levels (by count, value, or volume). In addition to these basic inventory policies, you can also define more advanced “risk” policies, using the distribution algorithm of your choice (normal, poisson, etc.), if you are forecasting a family or SKU where demand can be highly variable. And for each warehouse, you define, at a minimum, the cost and UOM cost, the stock on hand (available, and free, if different), in transit, allocated, and on (back) order. When this is combined with a forecast and a time period is defined, the system is able to compute an optimal suggested inventory plan by SKU and individual warehouse location. It can then become your draft inventory plan as-is, or you can manually alter it first. Once the draft plan is accepted, it becomes the new, current, inventory plan.

And since the module is tightly integrated with the forecasting module, it’s easy to go back to a forecast, revise it, and return to the inventory plan. (For example, if you simply click on the selected forecast in the inventory optimizer, up pops the forecast module.) And once you have an optimized inventory plan, you can immediately jump into the MRP (Material Resource Planning) module which will take the inventory plan (and the forecast it is based on), the sales order, WIP (Work In Progress) data, and other associated information and produce a raw material requirements plan if you also have the association material planning information (either in SYSPRO or another ERP or database you connect to).

Finally, between the integrated Crystal Report Writer, it’s support for VB scripting, and its direct Excel integration, you can product just about any report you want (although it might take some work on the part of the developer if it isn’t a report that’s already in, or similar to what’s already in, the system). As for getting data in, the system can accept CSV, XML, and SQL database scripts (as the schema is exposed). In summary, SYSPRO provides a solid forecasting and inventory optimization offering for SMBs.

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SYSPRO: Forecasting and Inventory Optimization for Small & Mid-Sized Businesses, Part I

SYSPRO is an established ERP suite provider (that has been around for over 30 years) that also provides Forecasting, Inventory Optimization, and Warehouse Management solutions in addition to the 40+ other modules that it provides. The Inventory Optimization solution (in SYSPRO 6.1) is one of their newest offerings. It’s built on top of their solid forecasting module and provides SMBs with a good inventory management and optimization solution, especially if they are already running SYSPRO.

While SYSPRO (a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner) isn’t an Oracle or SAP, they are a fairly significant company in the mid-market with over 14K customers in 60 countries that contribute to their 300M footprint. Furthermore, their solution is built on top of the Microsoft .Net platform, integrated with the Microsoft Office suite, and easy to pick up by anyone who is familiar with Microsoft Small Business Products. In particular, if you can use Microsoft Project, you can use their products. This is an appropriate technology stack (and strategy) for most of their target market who are already using Windows and Microsoft (Back Office) Products as it minimizes the new-user learning curve.

Their forecasting solution is quite robust. (For a discussion of forecasting, see the glossary page, which also contains links to some relevant posts.) It allows you to forecast at the individual SKU level and at the product family level, which generally creates more robust long-term forecasts. The forecasting solution can take into account historical data, projected sales, promotions, current stock levels, target stock levels (by location), lead times, and policies and create a (monthly, weekly, or daily) forecast using a variety of algorithms. You can select your preferred algorithm, or let the program choose the algorithm that is the best fit given historical data patterns. The program tracks the current forecast, the draft forecast (revision) under consideration, and the suggested forecast created from the last modelling session, which you can manually alter or revise to create a new draft forecast, which will become the new forecast once approved by an administrator.

The algorithms at your disposal include competition, Holt-Winters additive, Holt-Winters multiplicative, annual seasonal profiles (smoothed and unsmoothed), mean, median, moving average, exponential smoothing (with or without trending), multi-period weighted average (six, twelve, etc.), and a few others. (A good overview of these forecasting models can be found on resample.com.) In each case, the system will generate a forecast and graphically plot it against sales for the last three relevant periods (e.g. if you were forecasting Jan to Dec 2010, it would plot Jan to Dec 2007, Jan to Dec 2008, and Jan to Dec 2009, if available), the current forecast, and the current draft forecast so that you can visually see whether the forecast is in line with historical behavior and what is currently expected. This allows you to quickly spot whether a trend might be out of whack or whether (or not) the revised forecast produces spikes in line with upcoming promotions.

The system will also generate all of the relevant statistical data, including the cumulative forecast error, mean absolute deviation, mean square deviation, mean absolute % error, and tracking signal so that you can check the calculations and understand how much confidence you should have in the result. For each algorithm, it will also allow you to alter any of the controlling parameters (and re-run the forecast at any time). (But you should only do this if you are well versed in the art of forecasting and know what you are doing. However, if you are an expert, it’s great to have all this power to run multiple what-ifs and understand the ripple effects minor deviations in sales trends have on your forecasts, which in turn can effect your optimal inventory strategy.) And, as I noted above, you can do this forecasting at the group / product family level or the individual SKU level. This allows you to quickly generate a robust group forecast and then dive in and alter only those individual SKU forecasts that need to be tweaked to take into account upcoming promotions or new seasonal trends. In addition, you can also restrict the group forecast to any meaningful combination of warehouses, stock codes, suppliers, and product classes — which gives you a lot of power and flexibility in forecast creation. And the more advanced users can set up batch forecasting runs, forecast-over-forecast comparisons, and even Pareto analyses, but this takes us into the realm of inventory optimization, which is the subject of Part II.

In other words, the SYSPRO forecasting module packs a lot of power into a relatively easy to use SMB software solution. And with SYSPRO 6.1, you now get a true Inventory Optimization Solution!

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The Basics of Inventory Optimization

Inventory optimization can be defined as the act of balancing supply and demand uncertainty to meet desired services level at a minimum level of investment. In addition to all of the basic factors of inventory management covered in our last post (namely, production, stock, location, transportation, and information), inventory management also considers all of the associated costs — carrying costs, stock out costs, alternate distribution costs, and lead time costs, and tries to balance them.

As such, an inventory optimization solution will allow you to define:

  • your current production & distribution networks, and any flexibility you have
  • the modes of transportation available to you and associated fixed and variable costs
  • the lane options available to you and impacts on transportation costs
  • current and projected demands by SKU, family, and location by time period (month, week, or day)
  • storage and carrying costs
  • desired service levels by SKU, family, and location
  • projected cycle times
  • production capacity constraints and feasible schedules
  • network and storage constraints
  • current contractual commitments
  • upcoming promotions
  • compliance requirements

As well as your flexibility in terms of service levels and working capital and produces optimal inventory recommendations at different trade-off levels. You can then analyze costs and projected losses at 90%, 93%, and 95% service levels (defined in terms of product availability) and make the best decision that balances working capital tied up in inventory and revenue potential.

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The Basics of Inventory Management, Courtesy of SYSPRO

As a precursor to my future post on SYSPRO’s new Inventory Optimization solution, I thought I’d provide a brief review of their free e-book on Supply Chain, Inventory Management, & Optimization: Skills for Small Businesses, available on request to clients and prospects. While it doesn’t delve deep into inventory (and related supply chain) optimization, it does a great job describing the basics of inventory management and serves as a great introduction to the subject to small and mid-size businesses just beginning to tackle the issue.

When beginning to delve into the issue of inventory management, there are five factors that need to be considered: production, stock, location, transport, and information requirements. Associated with each factor are a number of decisions that need to be made, which are summarized in the following table:

Production capacity

flexibility

facilities

SKU vs Job Lot vs. Cross-Docking
Stock basic vs seasonal vs safety

level

variety

Location supplier proximity

customer proximity

Transportation mode

frequency

flexibility

Information collection

distribution

More specifically,

  • should you centralize production, and increase shipment times to remote locations, or decentralize production and minimize shipment times to any particular customer location?
  • should you maintain high levels of stock to prevent a stock-out, or implement flexible manufacturing and JIT delivery?
  • should you organize inventory by SKU, by Job Lot, or implement Cross-Docking?
  • how does seasonality affect your safety stock levels?
  • ship, rail, truck, air, cableway, pipeline, conveyor, or wire?
  • should you centralize your warehouses, or distribute them?
  • should you implement POS or rely on traditional back-room systems?

The goal is to balance trade-offs to maximize agility, adaptability, and alignment in your supply chain which balances customer service levels and internal operating efficiencies to make sure that you can provide your customers with the right goods, at the right price, at the right time.

As such, you need to be concerned with stock assortment, level, turnover, and associated costs. More specifically, what is the right mix of product at any particular time to maximize turnover and minimize associated costs? Then, you have to acquire the inventory, within working capital constraints, and track real-time utilization to improve future forecasts. This should all be done in accordance with comprehensive inventory management policies, which should be designed to quickly identify and eliminate overstock (before the product spoils or becomes obsolete) and replenish popular items in a timely fashion. These policies can use one or more inventory control methods, which can be manual (like ticker, click, and stub) or automatic (like pos terminals).

And once you’ve got the basics of inventory management down, you can move on to inventory optimization.

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