Apriso
Inventory Management
 

Think Beyond Inventory Management of a Single Plant to Achieving Material Synchronization Across Your Global Product Supply Network

In the quest for manufacturing excellence, inventory management plays a critical role. Manufacturers are looking for ways to reduce inventory, improve material flow and enable efficiencies through material synchronization and Just-in-Time or Just-in-Sequence inventory management processes. In addition, companies need tight management and traceability of inventory in order to control and improve quality.  Apriso customers have made tremendous strides in reducing their inventories without detriment to expediting costs, or their order fill rates. One Medical Device customer reduced inventories 25-35% across 16 plants. Another Consumer Goods manufacturer slashed Work in Process inventory 50% and reduced cycle time by 50%. Improving inventory tracking accuracy helps to reduce inventory requirements, anywhere from $200K to $10M per plant.

Apriso's FlexNet solutions, including FlexNet Warehouse and FlexNet Lean Material Flow in particular, are enabling a new approach to global inventory management. Instead of managing inventory just in the warehouse, as traditional systems do, FlexNet makes the warehouse part of the seamless flow of materials and production processes throughout your enterprise.

This ‘big picture' view allows a tight coordination of operations to reduce the amount of inventory and Work in Process (WIP) in the plant, improve cycle time, increase productivity, improve inventory accuracy, reduce errors, simplify reporting and provide full control over internal processes, inventory positions and movements. This approach can support your Lean manufacturing initiatives by extending these programs into the warehouse.

FlexNet enables efficient inventory management by:

  • Empowering manufacturers with visibility over, control into, and synchronization of material across all operations to increase inventory accuracy while reducing inventory buffers, without impacting customer satisfaction

  • Providing real-time, accurate and detailed inventory tracking information to the right people at the right time to make informed decisions for capacity management and production balancing

  • Supporting a wide variety of inventory management and replenishment models including Kanban, Just-In-Time manufacturing and Just-In-Sequence to support advanced Pull-based material flow

  • Directed and automated communication of inventory requirements and replenishment signals to warehousing and suppliers based on actual production consumption  so components can be delivered to the correct location, on time

  • Tracking materials  all the way from suppliers to receiving the components through production, including third party manufacturers, and shipping finished goods

  • Maintaining full genealogy and traceability of materials, processes, employees, equipment and storage locations

  • Supporting technologies such as RFID tracking, and multiple inventory processes such as cross docking, consignment inventory or vendor managed inventory, and postponement strategies