Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category:
New solution from Oracle to help shippers expedite their invoicing
Oracle has come out with a new solution designed to expedite financial settlement and billing which will help the shippers gain more speed and transparency in invoicing. This is being termed as the industry’s ‘first comprehensive” approach to managing Enterprise Application Documents. This announcement was made at “Oracle OpenWorld” and aims at helping the shippers expedite business processes constrained by critical information tied up in paper forms and electronic documents.
“When your employees can’t see critical enterprise documents like invoices, customer agreements and product specifications while they are working in their CRM and ERP applications, they can feel like they are flying blind,” said Andy MacMillan, Oracle’s vice president, product management. “We realized that we needed to take a comprehensive approach to managing Enterprise Application Documents that would work both in the context of CRM applications that require flexible, ad hoc access to customer and product documents and with ERP applications that have high volume, transactional requirements.”
“We realized that just providing ad hoc or transactional support wouldn’t let our customers empower all their users and reap the productivity gains possible through a truly unified approach to Enterprise Application Documents,” added MacMillan.
Oracle’s Enterprise Application Documents approach is enabled by the integration of Oracle content management products, part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, and Oracle Applications. With this integration, Oracle is providing its Applications’ customers with a set of content management services that makes all paper-based and electronic documents — including invoices, HR forms, product specifications and customer contracts — directly visible, searchable and manageable from within Oracle Applications.
Subscribe to the comments for this postWhy inventory is held by companies?
Inventory is a list of goods and materials, or those goods and materials themselves, held available in stock by a business. There are various reasons for which the companies hold inventory. For example, suppliers hold the inventory so that the customers may not be affected by manufacture/supply delay. Again, manufacturers keep inventory because there may be lower production efficiencies if production capacity stands idle for lack of materials. Some other reasons for keeping stock include:
1. Buffer stock is held in individual workstations to handle situations when the upstream workstation may be a little delayed in providing the next item for processing.
Sometimes, overproduction stock is there when the forecast does not match with actual sales.
2. Safety stock is held against process or machine failure in the hope that the failure can be repaired before the stock runs out.
3. Lot delay stock is held because a part of the process is designed to work on a batch basis whilst only processing items individually. Therefore each item of the lot must wait for the whole lot to be processed before moving to the next workstation.
4. Demand fluctuation stock is kept if the production is not flexible enough to keep up with the changes in demand. So, this stock is utilized when demand exceeds production capacity.
5. Changeover stock is held after a sub-process that has a long setup or change-over time. This stock is then used while that change-over is happening.
Whatever be the reason for holding these stocks, inventory management is very essential for any company. Also, stocks should be kept at minimum so that capital does not remain stuck up with excess inventory.
LG aiming to globalize its Supply Chain network
Last month, at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals conference, LG’s Chief Supply Chain Officer Didier Chenneveau revealed the fact LG had been making dramatic supply chain strides with the goal of becoming a top three company in each of its markets. Some of the broader supply chain steps taken by LG include:
* An increase in outsourced manufacturing .
* Improved cost visibility across the organization
* Globalization of its supply chain.
* A move to a more demand-driven supply model with more accurate forecasting.
Among the specific strategies taken up by LG’s supply chain team are:
* Creation of 10 metrics across various areas to track progress and report to the CEO on them twice a year
* Standardize on one ERP system (Oracle)
* Standardize on one financial system
* Consolidate the various WMS/TMS instances
* Standardize RFPs and contract terms and conditions across the company
* Improve sales forecast accuracy from 30% in 2008 to its current level of 40% with the goal of 60%
* Make English the standard language across the company’s supply chain to facilitate better communication
* Standardize job titles in the supply chain
* Rationalize the more than 41,000 SKUs LG carried in 2008.
LG Electronics has been taking these steps with a goal of outsourcing more manufacturing as it moves from a mostly Asian manufacturer to a global consumer electronics giant.
Plug Power announces its strategy to achieve profitability
Plug Power Inc. is an established leader in the development and deployment of clean, reliable energy solutions, integrates fuel cell technology into motive and continuous power products. Now the company, during its analyst and investor meeting held on Thursday, October 8, 2009, announced its strategy for achieving profitability and generating a positive cash flow for the first time in the Company’s history.
For this, Plug Power will focus resources on its two commercial products, GenDrive(TM), a superior alternative to lead-acid batteries in the material handling market, and GenSys(R), a continuous-run prime power system that replaces diesel generators at remote telecommunication sites where the grid is non-existent or unreliable.
The Company’s presentation highlighted its plans to double shipments of their products each year from 2010 to 2012, equating to approximately 7,200 to 9,400 shipments at the end of 3 years which in turn would double the revenue over the same period.
In an attempt to attain its goal of profitability, Plug Power will try to lower product costs by leveraging the supply chain, lowering manufacturing costs and improving system reliability for both product lines. Key success factors include product expansion, starting with the release of the class-2 stand-up reach truck product for electric lift trucks in the fourth quarter of 2009.
“Plug Power has established a strategy to bring the Company to profitability,” said Plug Power’s CEO, Andy Marsh. “We have surveyed what it will take to sustain Plug Power into the future and have developed a thoughtful plan to engender success.”
The objectives of Supply Chain Management
The Term Supply Chain Management came into existence in 1980s with an objective of addressing the needs of consolidating key business processes, from the original suppliers to the end users. Here, original suppliers refer to those identities which provide products, services and information that add value for customers and other stakeholders. Thus Supply Chain Management requires that companies and corporations involve themselves in a supply chain by exchanging information regarding market fluctuations and production capabilities.
The idea is to optimize the entire supply chain network by providing all the relevant information to every relevant company in the supply chain instead of companies seeking to sub optimize based on a local interest. This helps in improving the entire supply chain scenario with better planned overall production and distribution. This not only leads to cost reduction but also quality final product, thus increasing sales to the benefit of all the units involved. Thus the concept of competition between two companies fades and rather it is the betterment of a supply chain.
Thus, the main aim of supply chain management is to enable best utilization of resources like including distribution capacity, inventory and labor to fulfil the needs of the customer. In order to meet its objective of matching demand with supply with the minimal inventory, the SCM includes liaising with suppliers to eliminate bottlenecks; sourcing strategically to strike a balance between lowest material cost and transportation, implementing JIT (Just In Time) techniques to optimize manufacturing flow; maintaining the right mix and location of factories and warehouses to serve customer markets, and using location/allocation, vehicle routing analysis, dynamic programming and, of course, traditional logistics optimization to maximize the efficiency of the distribution side.
Experts from J.P. Morgan offer Supply Chain tips
Business is all about risk and unpredictability. The global trade management experts at J.P. Morgan offer some tips to importers and exporters to prepare better for natural disasters, port strikes, and other factors beyond their control and to decide what emergency planning considerations should be in place to better ensure that a company’s supply chains operate in tough times. Some of the suggestions from these experts include:
In making your initial sourcing and fulfillment decisions, certain risk items should be considered. These include political risks of the country, physical and geographic risks like availability and proximity of primary and alternative logistics networks for all modes, historic weather/natural disasters, labor union action and so on and also economic and market risks like fuel prices, currency exchange and inflation.
Ensure that there is efficient communication throughout the supply chain among the team members who are responsible for the decision making during a crisis.
Keep alternatives open. Use the services of multiple carriers at all times who use different ports of dispatch. Have the ability to diversify transportation. Transportation routes may be disrupted so it is important to have alternate means of transportation.
Keep a track of and constantly monitor each country/region for threats and trends which will impact your supply chain: Weather, port and transportation strikes, fuel prices, currency exchange, inflation, labor rates, pending legislation (i.e., trade sanctions, quotas, anti-dumping duties, Free Trade Programs), political elections that may alter the country’s view of trade.
Keep your supply chain flexible so that it not only has the capacity to keep up with a large increase in demand, but also that the pipeline can be slowed down in case of demand drop to avoid a build up of unnecessary inventory.
Have a solid cross-trained workforce that can react fast. If part of your supply chain is directly affected by the disaster, it is important to have people that can keep the operation running as best as possible.
Keep a backup of all trade-related documentation in electronic format somewhere offsite. If all records are lost in the actual site, they are easily and readily obtained from a different location.
Conduct a risk assessment of your existing supply chain. If you are uncertain as to how your supply chain will hold up in times of trouble, hire outside global trade experts to assess risk and help strengthen your supply chain.
These tips are very helpful in increasing the productivity of supply chains and making them more adaptive to changing times.