A cost-effective supply chain collaboration between manufacturer and suppliers is paramount.  Without that constraint addressed, all other benefits are pointless. Let us stipulate that cost-effective collaboration starts with electronic Kanban, or eKanban. 

All of Ultriva is excited that we will be exhibiting at SuiteWorld 2014 in San Jose, California from May 12-15, 2014. The SuiteWorld Conference is expected to attract more than 6,000 NetSuite customers, partners, and developers from around the world. SuiteWorld is NetSuite’s largest user conference and Ultriva representatives will be showcasing their supply chain management solution which will complement NetSuite Cloud ERP. Attendees can visit Ultriva at booth #818.

Ultriva’s Lean Suite provides a collaborative platform for manufacturers to establish Electronic Kanban with their customers and suppliers. All the Ultriva modules – Inventory Optimization Tool (IOT), Customer Kanban, Supplier Kanban and Lean Factory Management, will exchange data seamlessly with NetSuite ERP.

Ultriva will feature a live demonstration of the Ultriva Inventory Optimization Tool with direct connectivity to NetSuite. This demonstration illustrates precisely how Ultriva extracts historical data from NetSuite and simulates potential inventory savings.

Often overlooked in lean manufacturing initiatives is the supply chain; in particular supplier replenishment. Global multi-national manufacturers can use supplier replenishment as the ultimate tool in lean manufacturing best-practices. 

Multi-national management organizations usually turn to improved best-practice technology solutions when one of two circumstances occurs: rapid growth requiring improved throughput capacity or serious quality-control issues, often under the scrutiny of regulatory compliance or threat of litigation. Both these challenges produce lower customer satisfaction if the correct products are not received in a timely, safe, and accurate manner.

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. 

Lean in its purest form is removal of waste. In today’s world, manufacturing is becoming more competitive than ever with shorter lead times, higher service levels, exploding number of finished goods SKUs, and thinning margins. Over the last twenty years, the focus of lean in manufacturing was concentrated on streamlining the factory floor, aligning of production lines, optimization of space, and standardizing of operating procedures.