Rahul Jhalawad, CFO of Avtron Power Solutions, shares his experience working with LMA Consulting Group to address critical business challenges. Learn how LMA’s expertise helped identify key focus areas, implement actionable strategies, and drive measurable results for their team.

LMA partnered with Avtron Power Solutions to design and develop capacity planning capabilities so that they could gain better visibility into what is coming down the pike (sales orders, quotes, forecasts, and interbranch transfers) and better plan staffing, reallocate production among sites and subcontractors, purchase equipment, expand manufacturing capabilities and take other appropriate actions. Because much of the business is engineer-to-order (ETO) and configure-to-order (CTO), gaining visibility into demand at a product grouping level before detailed designs are complete was the key to success. Thus, we dug into the demand plan, estimated key product groupings, and allocated to the appropriate work centers and estimated the labor requirements. We gained visibility into upcoming demand and put together plans to ramp up production appropriately. It led to achieving the largest annual revenue in history. Thus, a proactive SIOP (Sales Inventory Operations Planning) process was rolled out so that forward-looking decisions could be made to ensure profitable growth.

After gaining a view into future demand, we focused attention on rolling out the appropriate process improvements, shored up data integrity, and ramped up to utilizing MRP. There was quite a bit of foundational work that had to be addressed including item property setups, evaluating ERP setups for boms and routings to incorporate differences between production facilities, assessing the benefits and work associated with phantom bills of materials vs. detailed transaction processing, and finding win-win solutions to optimize for planning vs operations while ensuring customer service attainment. A blueprint was developed to dramatically reduce day-to-day workload while providing improved use of MRP.  MRP upgrades drove high customer service levels, shortened lead times, and commonsense inventory decisions (right-sizing of inventory). 

 

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