The company referenced in this case study is a global electronics manufacturing services (EMS) provider that serves original equipment manufacturers in technology-related industries such as communications and computer hardware. Industry leading flexibility in manufacturing and exceptional customer service ensures that the company's customers reach volume and profitability with maximum acceleration. As such, collaborative partnerships with customers are the cornerstone to the company's value proposition, making customer responsiveness and service paramount to maintaining a competitive edge in this highly dynamic industry.
The Challenge
The company faces the daily challenges of operating within a volatile environment, addressing a broad range of customers—each with its unique requirements—and managing multiple, geographically dispersed manufacturing sites.
Given its priority of customer responsiveness, the EMS provider needed to improve data availability and analysis to support decision-making and response times in managing dynamic customer demand. Managing order promising and on-time delivery in response to order and/or forecast changes were urgent needs in particular. As well, effectively managing engineering changes is an ongoing focus because many of the company's business engagements with customers are at the design and first-time build stage.
The RapidResponse Advantage
RapidResponse provides the company with the ability to drive rapid resolution to persistent changes across the supply chain. Users can access accurate and detailed information in an easy-to-use spreadsheet-like interface embedded with ERP analytics and automatically populated with live data feeds from company's ERP system. Participants from across various functional groups can instantly model ERP data to simulate and share the impacts of countless "what-if" scenarios in response to changes in supply, demand and product. They can then rapidly score these scenario alternatives against set performance metrics to ensure that decisions are aligned with corporate goals.
The RapidResponse solution offers key functionalities not found in traditional planning systems (e.g. component to sales order allocation and pegging, clear visibility of projected delivery dates of demand records, prioritization of MRP exception messages and business metrics and trend analysis/reporting to name a few).
A clear indicator of the solution's breadth of value and ease of use, RapidResponse has been deployed globally in multiple areas of EMS provider; including Demand Planning, Scheduling, Inventory Management, Purchasing, Supply Chain Management, Customer Service, and Program Management groups, as well as external customer sites.
The Results Speak for Themselves
With RapidResponse, the company is able to offer its customers more accurate original-commitment information and supporting details for constraints or problem materials through improved 'capable-to-promise' analysis—increasing on-time delivery performance by 40 percent in just eight months. What's more, RapidResponse's ability to provide actionable data that's readily accessible to everyone who needs it has reduced the company's response times to customers for demand change requests by 80 percent.
RapidResponse provides accurate product lead time information internally and to the EMS provider's customers—all with the supporting detail required to simulate and assess inventory reduction options. With the help of the tool, manufacturing lead times have been reduced by 20 percent and confidence in the accuracy of the lead time is very strong. For one customer who strategically invested in inventory, RapidResponse aided in defining the investment needed to meet a certain flexibility factor, which allowed product lead times to be reduced by 50 percent overall.
