Industrial Products Company Improves On-time Delivery and Reduces Inventory

Pressure to Improve\nIf you’re like our other clients, you’re frustrated. You’re under pressure to improve performance, but you can’t get the insights you need fast enough. One described it like running through a room full of furniture with the lights out: you keep crashing into things but you have to get up and keep moving.\nThis situation is grossly unfair. To drive performance you need to turn on the lights with insights provided by actionable data.\nThe most frustrating thing is that most people are buried in data. But it’s not usable because it’s a hodge-podge patchwork of spreadsheets, custom apps, paper systems, and disconnected legacy systems.\nDriving improvement in this kind of world is really, really hard because you’re always reacting, and you’re always late. You’re reacting because you can’t see problems until they become obvious. And you’re late because it takes too long to get to actionable information. This is not a sustainable way to drive performance improvement.\nDealing with Yesterday’s Problems\nIf you’re reacting and you’re late, you’re dealing with yesterday’s problems.\nExpensive sort and rework efforts must go all the way back to the last good data point. That increases WIP and increases order-to- cash cycle times. Unplanned downtime impacts schedule adherence, and to compensate, many leaders create a buffer in finished goods inventory, driving up costs. And when defects escape to the customer, they damage trust and confidence.

The customer is an industrial products company facing significant challenges in improving their manufacturing supply chain processes. They are under immense pressure to enhance performance but struggle to obtain actionable insights quickly due to a fragmented data landscape. Their data is scattered across various formats, including spreadsheets, custom applications, paper systems, and disconnected legacy systems. This disjointed data environment makes it difficult for them to react promptly to issues, often leading to delayed responses and dealing with problems only after they have escalated. The company experiences increased work-in-progress (WIP) and extended order-to-cash cycle times due to the need for extensive sort and rework efforts. Unplanned downtime further disrupts their schedule adherence, forcing them to maintain a buffer in finished goods inventory, which drives up costs. Additionally, defects that escape to customers erode trust and confidence in their products.