Inventory Management & Control Consulting
As executives continue to navigate these volatile economic conditions, the focus on inventory management increases. It is especially tough to determine what to do if you don’t know if sales opportunities will dramatically increase as the competition falters and consumers drive demand or if sales will tank as recession fears increase and business optimism falters. Worse yet, even if you can get ahead of the most likely scenarios and build resiliency into your processes, supply chain disruptions continue to abound. Thus, the best and proactive are increasing the focus on inventory management and are prioritizing strategic decisions related to inventory. Likewise, the worst are also prioritizing inventory because they are panicked over cash flow. As you can imagine, inventory expertise is in high demand!
How Do You Benefit from Inventory Management & Control Consulting?
Sales & Marketing
Sales and Marketing leaders will gain high levels of service for their customers with on-time-in-full (OTIF) levels in the high 90’s, shorter lead-times, and high ratings on customer scorecards. They also will gain improved levels of responsiveness to customer needs and confidence in new product rollouts.
Engineering
For engineer-to-order (ETO) and configure-to-order (CTO) businesses, Engineering leaders will gain visibility into workload requirements to support drawings, customer approvals, and bill of material designs. They will be able to plan for the appropriate level of engineering capacity and capabilities.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing leaders will gain visibility into work center, machine, equipment, tooling, maintenance, staffing, and training requirements so that they can plan accordingly. They will also gain visibility into the master production schedule so that they can optimize run sizes with changeovers and costs.
Purchasing
Purchasing leaders will gain visibility into raw material, component, ingredient, and outside processing requirements so that they can work with suppliers to set up the appropriate programs and contracts to meet customer requirements. Suppliers will have visibility to capacity and scorecards.
Logistics
Logistics leaders will gain visibility into storage, warehousing, handling, picking, packing, shipping, transportation, returns, and equipment requirements so that they can plan accordingly. As gaps arise, service and cost options can be analyzed to expand capacity or capabilities as needed to support customers.
Finance
Finance leaders will gain visibility into sales forecasts, engineering and manufacturing plans, capital expenditure needs, purchase forecasts, staffing and support resource requirements, logistics forecasts, and inventory projections. Thus, they will have revenue, cost, profitability, and cash flow projections.
Planning
Planning leaders will gain visibility into the demand plan, sales orders, quotes, replenishment orders, and work order status so that they can develop the best master production schedule (MPS) to optimize customer service, operational efficiency and working capital. They will gain high service levels and increased margins.
Blog posts for Inventory Management
In this Supply Chain Byte, Lisa Anderson discusses why manufacturers must align demand and supply at each step of the supply chain, using California’s oil and gas and refinery capacity challenges as an example of how reduced capacity can create ongoing pressure and an operational bottleneck.
Lisa Anderson explains why AI cannot replace a formal SIOP process. While technology can improve analysis and decision-making, successful planning still requires strong business processes, cross-functional alignment, operational discipline, and organizational accountability.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a powerful tool in the supply chain leader’s toolkit. Although there is no shortage of hype surrounding AI, the most successful organizations are finding practical ways to leverage its capabilities to improve decision-making, accelerate analysis, and uncover opportunities hidden within their data.
