solutions inventory system

Inventory Systems Struggle to Cope With Growing Supply Chain Complexity

As any good lean manufacturing practitioner will tell you, inventory is one of the key wastes that lean six sigma processes focus on eliminating. A good inventory system is required to gain the upper hand. An inventory system incorporates inventory management software and inventory policies to ensure that just the right amount of inventory is in the right place at the right time.

While this may seem simple enough, in fact, it's become increasingly difficult to achieve given the growing complexity of today's supply chains. Globalization and specialization has led to the creation of supply networks comprising a large number of suppliers, contract manufacturers, 3rd party logistics providers and the like.

Inventory systems need to define inventory policies and manage the transactional movement of inventory throughout the supply chain. Complicating this process is the increasing demand, supply and product volatility that supply chains have to deal with today. Today's reality is a highly dynamic supply chain requiring solid planning and exceptional responsiveness to deal with increasingly frequent unplanned events.

Avoid Unnecessary Inventory Spend

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ helps you achieve an effective inventory system by first providing you supply chain visibility so you can see all inventories at all nodes of the supply chain. Decisions are made every day to determine how inventory should be placed and moved. Without comprehensive and detailed inventory visibility across your supply chain, you risk expensive and unnecessary actions. Far too many companies expedite new supply, for example, when they could have leveraged existing inventory if only they had known where it was and whether or not it was available.

RapidResponse is the inventory management software needed to meet this challenge. Designed for the dynamic realities of today's supply chain, RapidResponse proactively monitors your inventory policies, alerts you to exceptions and arms your supply chain staff with the supply chain visibility and tools for risk tradeoff and response to deal with unplanned events.

With RapidResponse, you can avoid unnecessary spending because you can utilize your global inventories more efficiently, thereby driving inventory reductions (or avoiding excess and obsolete inventory) while simultaneously achieving customer satisfaction requirements.