Have you ever taken the time to evaluate the current-state of your material procurement process?  If you have, there’s a good chance that you found the process to be executed by people in departmental silos trying to manage several complex and interrelated processes.   You probably also recognized  the large amount of analysis work required to make the right purchase decisions and the almost exclusive reliance on email, phone and fax to communicate and track individual purchase orders from release through to receipt of materials.  If you haven’t taken the time evaluate your current-state material procurement process, you should.  You might be surprised at what you find.

For many years, Information Technology (IT) executives in manufacturing firms have been looking to their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to help improve the operational and financial performance of their organizations.  And why not, they’ve spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on software licensing, a year or more implementing these systems and more than a few sleepless nights applying patches and updates from their ERP vendors.  However, most of their efforts have been disproportionately focused on back office processes due to the inherent shortcomings of ERP systems to address the business requirements of manufacturing processes inside the four walls of the plant.

How do you efficiently and cost effectively transition to a demand driven supply network without jeopardizing your position in industry or your commitments to your customers?

What do distributed manufacturing, changing customer demand patterns, global supply chains, undesirable growth in inventory, and increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve profitability all have in common?   These are just a few of the challenges faced by today’s manufacturing executives.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a system out there that could address each of the aforementioned challenges cost effectively and efficiently?  Well there is, it’s called a pull system (a.k.a. kanban) and it has been around for a long time.  Properly implemented, pull systems produce remarkable results.  So why isn’t pull more pervasive in manufacturing?  The simple reason is there have been more failures than successes.