About the company
Our customer is a globally operating company developing, manufacturing, and delivering medical devices to the worldwide market. They have 40 manufacturing sites across the globe.
The challenge
With a growing backlog due to material constraints and supply chain disruptions, the company was dealing with an increasingly larger orderbook. As a result, planners struggled to respond quickly and efficiently to demand changes and to communicate estimated delivery dates to their customers. They needed a way of quickly assessing their inventory on hand, splitting it between their clients, allocating it to specific orders, and communicating estimated delivery dates.
The project
Working directly with the excellence department and very closely with the planners, EyeOn was to support the creation of this new process and the tool to support it. The required deliverable was an orderbook with a coherent inventory split across orders, which aligned with the company’s business strategy.
Together with the customer, we took a 3-step-approach:
- Identify key information for decision-making and allocation policy definition.
- Design a process to prioritize countries and orders and to split on-hand inventory.
- Develop a user-friendly Python application to automate decision-making at order level.
Results
The result of this project are new decision-making rules to allocate inventory to order lines fairly. We helped automate the process to generate output quickly and with high consistency, which is then communicated to clients. This reduced the planner’s workload from several days to less than 1 hour while allowing them to reach better service levels. The planners also achieved a bigger data maturity and awareness of essential requirements to work with data.
Ready to reduce your planners’ workload?
Get in touch with us to learn how our specialists can help you set up decision-making rules to allocate your inventory to order lines fairly and increase the data maturity levels within your company significantly.