Are you a manufacturing company that wishes to extend your existing business system to accomplish one or more of the following?  

• Gain End to End Supply Chain Visibility (E2ESCV)
• Reduce your lead time by moving to a Demand Driven Manufacturing model
• Build trust in your supply chain through collaboration with suppliers and customers
• Migrate to electronic Kanban replenishment with suppliers for having the right part at the right place
• Increase your customer service levels by moving to consumption driven replenishment with your customers – OEMs, Distributors or Retailers.

Let Ultriva Lean Suite accomplish these goals and extend your investment in Oracle EBS 

Recently, Modern Materials Handling magazine published a case study of a pet supply company struggling with inventory. Warehouse workers had to physically bring the inventory to a computer to scan it, then send it on to the destination.  The process was “cumbersome and inefficient.” The problem was solved by adding mobile workstations with scanning capabilities. There was a definite, measureable ROI, productivity increased by 40%, with the added benefit of freeing up workers. Warehouse employees now dedicate less time to product movement.  Workers also use the mobile carts as label makers for pallets to save time instead of walking across the warehouse to the workstation to print. 

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.

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). 

Recently when I was walking through raw material warehouse at a manufacturing facility, I was reminded of the famous verse from “The Rime of Ancient Mariner”, which I had read over 30 years back;

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, ever where,
Nor any drop to drink

I could metaphorically relate this to the filling of warehouses with bloated inventory while encountering production stoppages due to non-availability of parts.

In today’s environment streamlining the supply chain is a high priority for most manufacturing companies.  Purchased parts are typically 60% or more of the manufacturing cost.  This puts tremendous pressure on materials and supply chain executives to drive these costs down, while at the same time improve on-time delivery.  A proven approach to achieve those goals is to improve supply chain collaboration.

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.