Today’s demand supply chain management is more and more relying on system – IT tools like ERP, EDI, suppliers portals etc. etc., which is good to speed up the information sharing between partners and shorten the cycle time for processes handling.
But the thing is always good and bad. Somehow we are too much relying on the IT tools even indulging ourselves with losing ourselves. Something just like when after computer is invented, less and less people are interested in calligraphy – handwritings, which is actually a kind of art of human being.
Same things are happening on supply chain management. After MRP is introduced to materials management, we are seeing less and less real planners who knows how to judge the purchase requisitions with their own brains, Today more and more planners are actually doing operators jobs, they do not need to think about, judge anything, they just feed the machines and waiting for the output of machines …
We need to get back to some traditional ways like hard copy approval for some critical control points of supply chain management.
- MPS – master production scheduling
This is something the most important in the total demand supply chain management, which must be approved the site materials director or even by the General managers.
The control points of this approval –
- historical forecast variance was analyzed with a variance trend chart
- current phases of PLC – product life cycle we are in for different products / models
- total available capacity (machine / operators etc.) is aligned with MPS loading, which is deciding how much buffer level we should or should not build for products;
- critical materials supply is analyzed and be prepared to handle those critical parts specially, which maybe a manual process as discussed in Chapter 3.
- Commitment to customers
This must be seriously and carefully handled – once we commit, we must achieve it with 100%. Sometimes people are too conservative to commit customers, sometimes they over-commit to customers, both are wrong and need to be controlled by managers even directors.
- PR / actions report for A commodity
Because most of the inventory is coming from these A commodities and usually the delivery flexibility is very bad for those suppliers, which either they do not accept push out / cancellation or there is little room for pull in. If we purely follow up the instructions from MRP for rescheduling these A commodities, we may suffer from either shortage or excess.
The control points for this approval is –
- Materials planners need to check / calculate the rationality for rescheduling information from total demand of monthly and try to avoid rescheduling activities back and forth in different weeks, which is easy to lose our reputation / credibility in suppliers side.
- Terms for rescheduling and the market supply trend must be double checked before take real actions by buyers;
- DOS on hand / on order vs rescheduling requests with a macro approach.
- Urgent shipment request
There are many excuses for urgent shipments which caused lots of extra logistics cost, but this is not the key, the most serious issue is behind urgent shipments, there may be many system problems / human mistakes hidden.
Many times we find that the so called urgent shipments are caused by wrong lead time maintained in ERP system; sometimes are purely human mistakes.
- Manual PR / PO
Manual PR is outside of MRP running, usually because of –
- Customer request for risk orders to components suppliers
- Alternative parts
- Last buy for EOL models
- Compensation for human mistakes
Our employees are usually very listening to customers because we are EMS and customer is customer, somehow our employees even do not want to follow their bosses’ instruction but just customers … sad to say that but that’s true, especially when the case happened between our low level employees and the low level employees from customers.
Risk order is quite risky to us, but sometimes our employee just release the orders to suppliers without approval;
Alternative parts are very hateful and very dangerous to handle, they must be approved by managers to help to reduce the mistakes of people;
Last buy PO is the most key activity for controlling and reducing the E & O liability for both customers and ours. When release last PO for components, people are either too conservative for cheap parts or too bodacious for more expensive parts. Approval from managers will be helpful to check on. Historical attrition / physical counting variance must be checked.
- Manual W/O or production orders
This is something quite similar with manual PO for risk orders from customers. As we said, people usually regard customer as everything, and customers can control our production lines what and when / how many to do. This is absolutely wrong and production team can only follow the production schedulers’ instruction for any production activities. Let them go or just escalate when there is any interruptions from whoever is not production planning persons.
- Adjustment for cycle counting variance
This is common sense but not executed very well, where 2 tings need be controlled –
- Owners for inventory adjustment. Who should be authorized for inventory adjustment when variance is found? Warehouse and Production? NO. Either inventory planning or finance only;
- Excuses on variance. Usually we need explain why variance is there and usually what we get from the owners of each inventory location is “ because we did not control materials very well …. We have variance” and the actions is “ we will strengthen the control, we will train the people there, we will enhance their duty of sense …” all these are bullshit and totally nonsense for digging out real root cause behind and not mention to improve.
These 7 areas are the most dangerous areas during daily materials operations and a regular audit like quarterly is needed for these 7 items to check the implementation. Remember that people are never self-controlled unless they are controlled and that’s the reason we still need to have managers / directors, VPs etc. We trust people but it does not mean we believe what people are doing …
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2009-06-01 10:49 程晓华 阅读(505)
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