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aerospace & defense
The Ten-thousand Foot View on Aerospace & Defense
We know what you are facing
As the industry continues to shift toward a greater amount of supplier content, companies are losing more and more control over their supply chain.
The need for supply chain management coordination between OEMs and suppliers has never been greater. This is true not just of the civilian market but the defense market, where many contracts are being delivered by international consortia.
The diagram below shows just how complex and multi-faceted these relationships have become in the 21st century.
Today's Challenges in Aerospace & Defense
A&D companies are feeling the pressure to streamline manufacturing and business processes in order to decrease unit cost of production. Never has the need for reducing inventories and maximizing engineering resources been greater.
Yet, demand volatility and faster order delivery expectations are taking their toll on the supply chain, not to mention the many other supply chain management challenges the A&D industry has to contend with:
- Volatile energy prices
- Spikes in metal prices
- Increasing global competition
- Aging legacy applications designed for a 20th century environment
We Can Help You Coordinate Actions Across Your Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain
To deal with today's increasingly complex supply chains, you need an integrated solution that empowers your staff with planning, monitoring and response capabilities. A&D enterprises not only need to develop sales and operations plans, but also coordinate the right compromise when things don't go according to plan.
What if you could…
- Regain supply chain visibility across your multi-tier, multi-enterprise supply chain?
- Provide all appropriate parties within your demand and supply chain organization with an understanding of manufacturing commitments and inventory positions throughout the supply network?
- Learn immediately about unplanned events, especially those that could do harm to the business or that require immediate attention by front-line responders?
- Analyze the impact of these events on your customers, your inventory and all of your key performance indicators (KPI)?
- Detail and select the appropriate course of action that maximizes your performance to these metrics?
RapidResponse enables you to do all of that, and it also includes specific functionality for the A&D industry, including:
- Inventory pooling
- Model-unit effectivity
- Line-of-balance reporting that provides a summary risk perspective on delivery schedule status for targeted units, allowing you to focus on critical scheduling decisions.
Supply Chain Management in Aerospace & Defense Becomes Mission Critical
Outsourcing has fundamentally changed the way aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturers source materials and manufacture their commercial and military systems. Not only can a supplier of major sub-assemblies not part of the company, they may not even be on the same continent!
Coordinating an extended supply chain to successfully deliver to customer expectations is the core reason our aerospace and defense customers have adopted Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™.
- “Lockheed Martin Aeronautics chose RapidResponse because it complements its highly complex supply chain infrastructure in dynamically aligning demand and supply.”
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With the right access to the right information, A&D operations teams can develop more efficient sales and operations plans, as well as make course corrections on the fly when the plan is at risk.
Several of the world's leading A&D manufacturers rely on RapidResponse to turn their supply chain management pains into gains. We have helped customers achieve the following operations performance improvements:
- Reduced excess inventory at one site by $600,000 in first month of use
- Reduced inventory by $52 million in first six months of use
- Reduced time to respond to change from five days to under 24 hours
Want to learn more about how RapidResponse can help you close the gap between planning and execution to increase customer service and reduce inventory risks?
