ERP integration: BreconRidge uses response management to meet customer demand
By Manufacturing Business Technology Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/29/2008 8:53:00 AM
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As a world-class provider of design engineering and manufacturing services for electronic products, BreconRidge collaborates on voice, video, and data applications with the world’s leading communications, industrial, medical, and aerospace & defense OEMs.
As a world-class provider of design engineering and manufacturing services for electronic products, BreconRidge's collaborative partnerships with customers are believed to be the cornerstone to BreconRidge’s value proposition, whereby excellent service is paramount to maintaining BreconRidge’s competitive edge in a highly dynamic industry.
BreconRidge operates daily within a volatile environment, addressing a broad range of customers—each with its unique requirements—and managing geographically dispersed manufacturing sites.
Given its priority on customer responsiveness, BreconRidge needed to improve data availability and analysis to support decision-making and response times in managing dynamic customer demand. Managing order promising and on-time delivery in response to order and forecast changes were urgent needs in particular. As well, effectively managing engineering changes is an ongoing focus because many of the company’s business engagements with customers are at the design and first-time build stages.
The ability to perform in-depth inventory analysis and liability assessment is key to ensuring root causes of slow-moving inventory are identified and rectified quickly, and that comprehensive data substantiating liabilities can be offered to customers.
The RapidResponse solution, offered by Kinaxis, arms BreconRidge with the ability to drive rapid resolution to persistent changes across the supply chain. Users can access accurate and detailed information in an easy-to-use, spreadsheet-like interface embedded with ERP analytics and automatically populated with live data feeds from BreconRidge’s SAP system. Participants from across functional groups can instantly model ERP data to simulate and share the impacts of countless “what-if?” scenarios in response to changes in supply, demand, and product. They can then rapidly score these scenario alternatives against set performance metrics to ensure that decisions are aligned with corporate goals.
RapidResponse also has key functionalities not found in traditional planning systems—e.g., component to sales order allocation and pegging, clear visibility of projected delivery dates of demand records, prioritization of MRP exception messages, and business metrics and trend analysis/reporting.
Using RapidResponse, BreconRidge now offer its customers more accurate original-commitment information and supporting details for constraints or problem materials through improved “capable to promise” analysis, increasing on-time delivery performance by 40 percent in just eight months.
RapidResponse also provides actionable data that’s readily accessible to everyone who needs it, a capability that improved BreconRidge’s response times to customers for demand change requests by 80 percent.
RapidResponse provides accurate product lead-time information internally and to BreconRidge’s customers with the supporting detail required to simulate and assess inventory reduction options. With the help of the tool, manufacturing lead times have been reduced by 20 percent and confidence in the accuracy of the lead time is very strong.
For one customer who strategically invested in inventory, RapidResponse helped define the investment needed to meet a certain flexibility factor, which reduced product lead times by 50 percent overall.
Says Glenda Paquin, BreconRidge VP of planning and supply management, “Supply chain management competencies comprise an integral component of BreconRidge’s value proposition. RapidResponse helped us achieve remarkable performance improvements in this area in a matter of months.”]
Kinaxis offers migration services for i2 users
Kinaxis says it has an incentive program for current i2 customers who may be concerned with the general uncertainty resulting from the recent acquisition of i2—in particular as it relates to their future product investment road maps.
The offer waives standard ERP integration fees for any i2 customers that decide to adopt the on-demand RapidResponse service, which gives multi-enterprise manufacturers integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring, and collaborative response capabilities.
"Many i2 customers are reevaluating their business and technology needs," says Randy Littleson, VP of marketing, Kinaxis. "We're offering them a proven solution that will not only provide the comfort of a long-term product development commitment, but will provide added benefit and broader value than their current solution."
Unlike other initiatives—often named safe passage programs—that require another lengthy and costly deployment and roll-out project, Kinaxis enables companies to take advantage of expanded supply chain management capabilities, and the resulting operational benefits via a cost-effective and low-risk on-demand service and a rapid and free deployment.
Differentiating itself in the marketplace, Kinaxis RapidResponse offers a one-to-many value proposition in a single integrated solution that can replace these seven i2 modules:
• Sales & Operations Management,
• Demand Manager,
• Demand Planner,
• Supply Chain Planner,
• Demand Fulfillment,
• Collaborative Supply Execution, and
• Supply Chain Visibility
Learn more here.
