The Customer

US based medical equipment manufacturer with supplies to over 20 countries was bleeding money in their supply chain with large volumes of dead stock, mismanaged demand and supply, delayed shipments leading to falling reputation. The situation had been urgent but not an emergency.

Key Challenges

• Lack of visibility of stock at different distribution levels leading to poor capacity planning eventually leading to insufficient or dead stock
• Manual escalations, approvals and requisitions leading to delayed decisions, productivity losses and cost leakages
• High dependence on “People” than “Process” for an end-to-end production cycle planning due to lack of automation

Percipience Solutions

• Identifying the key areas of process automation, system & department integration and work flows for quicker decision making
• A supply chain system with seamless integration at all distribution levels including international and local distributors giving real time access to stock at all levels
• Automated checks and alarms as stocks reached a critical level for any stake holder within the supply chain, with auto approval workflows across the hierarchy of the organization.
• QR code / RFID trackers to geo-locate the stock helping indicate the real-time stock levels
• Big Data with complex BI implementation for improved projections based on market & historical data. Production synchronously planned in accordance with the projections bringing leakages to within 5%
• Automated workflows for faster decision making drastically reducing the latency in the overall distribution cycle.
• Management dashboards giving real time health status of demand, production and distribution across product lines.

Roadblocks

• Mandating entire distribution network to deploy the supply chain application for real time seamless data flow across the ecosystem
• Staff resistance to increased monitoring giving much higher visibility of productivity and performance
• Collating data lying in silos with over 3 decades across 20 countries to create a more accurate projection engine

Impact

• Operational costs were reduced by over 20% across the supply chain
• Reduce dead stock by over 30%
• Reduced time to market by over 25%
• Increased employee & distributor benefits leading to higher brand loyalty

Timeline

9 months