Once a technology solution has been tested and vetted by a multi-national, multi-plant operation, it is rolled out enterprise-wide.  There are many reasons why this approach, tiptoeing into solutions with obvious bottom-line improvements, takes time.

Ultriva Engineering delivered various updates to the Ultriva 7.x software product last year. Some of these updates are minor bug fixes and some are new or enhanced features to the software based on customer inputs. We delivered Ultriva 7.6 recently and this version alone had about 15 new or enhanced features. Almost all of these 15 features grew out of our customer feedback. We take our customer input seriously and quickly incorporate their ideas and requests through our agile product development approach.  In comparison, such releases are uncommon in traditional onsite software products.

The medical technology industry employs over 500,000 workers according to the Medical Device Manufacturers Association (MDMA.)  The industry supports approximately 1.4 million additional jobs, for 1.9 million high-paying positions, and generated $113 billion in payroll, with an average salary over $84,000.  According to Ernst and Young, the average earning for public med-tech companies is 6%.

Continuing our blog posts on the End to End pull replenishment system, we will be tackling the most common of the eight requirements; the critical need for manufacturers to collaborate and integrate with their upstream supply chain. 

Nowadays most companies are asking their suppliers to hold inventory from which they can pull at a moment’s notice. In my fifteen years of service as a Senior Application Consultant for Ultriva, I have noticed a trend of towards Consignment/Vendor Managed Inventories/Supplier Owned Managed inventories. The reality is whether the company carries the inventory or the supplier carries the inventory, inventory is an inventory.  At the end of the day manufacturing companies are committed to acquiring this inventory. 

Every product release, whether it is a major version or a dot release, is an exciting time for a software development team.  As the development manager leading the Ultriva 7.6 release, we had to go through a different kind of rigor as the enhancements were spread across multiple application modules. 

Some of the key features covered in 7.6 version include auto generation of Purchase Orders in to PDFs, streamlining of production sequencing, inventory cost analysis report, an improved Kanban board and auto resizing wizard. But the feature that is closest to my heart (as I was responsible for its design and development) was Advanced Bill of Lading (BOL). 

My name is Lori McNeely and I am the Customer Support Specialist for Ultriva. My job is to support our customers when they have questions. 

Here at Ultriva we constantly strive to engage with our customers to deliver services that are beyond the norm. About eight months ago we discovered that our customers, who use Ultriva software solutions on a daily basis, do need ongoing training for several reasons: 

Last week we discussed the first requirement on why a collaborative transactional portal is a must have for establishing End to End (E2E) pull replenishment. Feel free to refer to the original blog that described E2E Pull and all the requirements.

The First Requirement for E2E

Last week, I wrote a blog highlighting the clear need for a cloud-based SaaS solution to establish the “End to End Pull” process across manufacturing companies (or E2E pull process or just E2E). In that blog, eight basic requirements for developing an E2E pull model were listed. 

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), (www.gartner.com), the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, has made a compelling case as to why manufacturers should integrate with the demand side to streamline their supply chain. They call this process as “End to End Pull (E2E)” replenishment. This is clearly a paradigm shift compared to the constant focus on improving the planning or forecasts using better and superior algorithms.