| By Tim Brindley | Senior Manager, Supply Chain Operations | Chainalytics |
Every person, regardless of industry, is caught in highly reactive day-to-day business rhythms, so it’s only natural to focus efforts on keeping up with internal and external customer-centric demands. Each day, new fires are started and put out, an over-abundance of meetings consume the staff, and competing direction from above dominates the work day. In the daily grind, it’s hard to take a step back and think about how to create proactive tools and business processes that save time and allow staff to look ahead and better utilize their day.
These challenges are no different for supply chain practitioners. Resource constrained teams experience difficulties executing inefficient operational processes to support the business and are burdened with either a) slow, highly manual operational tools, b) complex systems that lack integration, or c) all of the above – placing more stress on the organization and creating more questions than answers. In manufacturing and production, those issues are further compounded when an organization becomes highly reactive. The results include:
- Material Shortages – Shortages often result from a failure to capture and refresh supply or demand behavior necessary to set accurate inventory targets by product family, or the organization possesses inaccurate on-hand inventory level readings. A variety of technology solutions offer the ability to continuously capture supply, demand and on-hand inventory data to refresh inventory policies.
- Production Impacted by Raw Material Shortages – Scenarios exist where the production schedule is frozen and ready to be communicated to the productions floor; however, the lack of visibility of raw material inventory implies the plan is out, but one of the materials is not available on the floor, disrupting the entire production process.
- Lack of Contingency Plans – Organizations need to be prepared for the unexpected, for even after setting accurate inventory targets and performing periodic cycle counting, there are instances where material is unavailable and having visibility into the “slushy” schedule can ease the decision making process. Cross referencing the raw material warehouse, in transit inventory reports, and slushy productions schedule can be automated, allowing the system to raise an alert to either expedite a shipment or reschedule the production plan for later.
So how should we alleviate those problems? Complex (and expensive) software packages alone do not solve these issues, nor does custom reporting developed for these tools, much to the chagrin of the fortunate companies that can afford to splurge. No, the answer might have been in front of you all along (hint: it rhymes with “Rycroshoft Moffice.”) Did you get it yet?
That’s right, many supply chain professionals are surprised to learn that using MS Office Professional tools are oftentimes your best bet to bridging the gap between disconnected systems or gaps in reporting capabilities. To give you an example, we recently built a tool in MS Access for one of our customers that integrated reports from ERP, MES, WMS and Production Scheduling software systems to provide real time inventory balances. This tool cross-referenced available inventory at manufacturing line-side, at the warehouse, or in-transit to the warehouse and subtracted the requirements from the production plan in the coming days. If the balance reached “0” or was under the inventory policy threshold, an alarm is triggered within the tool to notify the purchasing agent of the negative decrement. The agent is then responsible for expediting any materials required to keep production running or communicate the need to change the production plan to exclude the affected production order and replace it with a new order.
Previously, this highly manual and error-riddled process of balancing material availability and identifying potential material shortages would take the purchasing agent 5 hours to perform, but by introducing this simple tool, the team has automated the process and reduced it to a few minutes. The purchasing agent now has more time available to perform core tasks and focus upon more value-adding activities in his/her day-to-day workflow, all thanks to a simple tool built in Access.
So the next time your company finds itself with a critical gap negatively impacting your operations, take a deep breath, brush off that MS textbook (or locate that fresh out of engineering school new hire) and start exploring the vast capabilities of MS Office that are at your fingertips.
Tim Brindley is a Senior Manager within the Supply Chain Operations competency at Chainalytics. He has more than 18 years of experience working in industry and as a consultant in both the public and private sectors. He has spent his entire career in Supply Chain; starting with intermodal logistics, branching into Supply Chain strategy for the Defense and Space Markets and Oil & Gas to streamline delivery of materials to well sites for his customers.
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