Quality Manufacturing Requires Data for Efficient Vendor Management

A single version of the truth improves relationships

Published: Tuesday, September 10, 2019 - 11:02

Manufacturers face constant challenges of rising expectations as customers and regulators demand better quality and greater traceability throughout the supply chain. Exacerbating matters are unpredictable tariffs, which necessitate faster responses to changing trade barriers and regulatory requirements. These factors must all be accomplished at lower costs while coping with already thin margins.

The solutions to these challenges already exist within current systems. Unlocking the value of data already in systems generates actionable insights from quality control and quality assurance for operations and plant-floor management.

Improving the entire manufacturing process allows manufacturers to optimally monitor costs, remaining within a range of profitability. If data (i.e., business intelligence) show information outside the acceptable range, it can be quickly adjusted.

For example, in food manufacturing there are too many moving parts, from hazard analysis critical control points (HACCP), to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), to ISO 22000:2018—“Food safety management systems—Requirements for any organization in the food chain.” Additionally, nonstop chain-of-custody considerations require a complex supplier network that allows insight to the entire value chain.

An effective place to start taming this complexity is vendor and inventory management.

Vendor management business intelligence

Only with a complete view of vendors can food manufacturers track and optimize vendor performance, which can lower costs and complexity while increasing traceability and inventory turns.

To accomplish bottom-line and actionable vendor management business intelligence, it is imperative that all levels of the operation share key data points with strategic vendors in real-time to reach common goals.

Inventory control business intelligence and key performance indicators

With actionable business intelligence technology, organizations are capable of gathering and modeling data from all their systems as well as external sources. Users then have real-time insight into vendor performance across these metrics. The resulting lower inventory costs and wastes will have a higher turnover rate. As companies become more adept in their use of business intelligence, they create portal solutions or distribute reports to vendors to keep them informed about performance metrics against stated goals.

In the food manufacturing industry, it is crucial to keep inventory at the right levels 24/7.

Advanced analytics inventory solutions push critical key performance indicators to the forefront to reduce cost and eliminate waste, while also adhering to well-accepted lean manufacturing principles.

Insights to individual SKUs must include:
• Inventory velocity
• Inventory days/days of supply
• Inventory turns
• Cash to cash time cycles
• Slow-moving or dead stock

Delivering instant impact

Accelerating access to resonant data ensures that food manufacturers can quickly deploy actionable practices with a positive effect for business. Through a predefined data integration package, data are extracted from enterprise resource planning systems and other existing systems to provide actionable dashboards and reports.

Delivering an end-to-end platform with all the toolsets needed to integrate data and deploy the dashboards across the organization satisfy both QA/QC professionals as well as plant-floor executives.

With data transformation tools, database technology, data governance, interactive reports, and live displays, food manufacturers are able to access embedded analytics with context. The same technology allows food manufacturers and suppliers to share performance metrics.

When data create a consistent and unified version of the truth, both suppliers and food manufacturers can evaluate and improve their relationship.

About The Author

Søren Block Olsen

Søren Block Olsen, the Director of Marketing at TARGIT Business Intelligence & Analytics, works with data-rich marketing systems providing him with first-hand insight into customer and market behavior. Olsen specializes in designing processes and systems to collect and turn data into useful information that supports business. He thrives on being where IT meets business, surrounded by people who are curious about the world and embrace changes because the status quo is not good enough. He has earned a Bachelors in Global Business Engineering and a Master of Science in International Technology Management from Aalborg University.