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Reparem como tudo está em linha com o que escrevemos neste blogue e como há uma oportunidade de futuro para a indústria europeia.
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"A US-based consumer durables manufacturer was losing ground to competitors because of problems with its legacy supply chain. Years before, the company—like many global manufacturers—had sent the lion’s share of its production to China while maintaining a much smaller presence in North America to stay close to the majority of its customers. One legacy of the move: all of its plants, relying on a unified production-planning process, essentially manufactured the full range of its thousands of products and their many components.
Now, however, increasingly volatile patterns of customer demand, coupled with product proliferation in the form of hundreds of new SKUs each year, were straining the company’s supply chain to the point where forecasting- and service-related problems were dissatisfying key customers. (Moi ici: A chave da mudança passa pelo aumento da incerteza, resultado de um aumento da diversidade - Mongo rules - cada vez mais SKUs, cada vez mais volatilidade nos pedidos dos clientes)
In response, the company examined its portfolio of products and components along two dimensions: the volatility of demand for each SKU it sold and the overall volume of SKUs produced per week.
... the company began rethinking its supply chain configuration." (Moi ici: As associações deviam estar a preparar os seus associados para o regresso dos clientes que foram para a China, a explicar-lhes o porquê, a preparar os argumentos de negociação... sem isso, vão receber o regresso dos clientes como mendigos e, assim, deixar muito dinheiro em cima da mesa)
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"Ultimately, the company decided to split its one-size-fits-all supply chain into four distinct splinters.
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For high-volume products with relatively stable demand (less than 10 percent of SKUs but representing the majority of revenues), the company kept the sourcing and production in China. (Moi ici: O negócio é quantidade, quantidade e estabilidade, escala e volume.)
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Meanwhile, the facilities in North America became responsible for producing the rest of the company’s SKUs, including high- and low-volume ones with volatile demand (assigned to the United States) and low-volume, low-demand-volatility SKUs (divided between the United States and Mexico). (Moi ici: E agora este ponto que se segue... é fundamental para a indústria europeia) Ramping up production in a higher-cost country such as the United States made economic sense even for the low-volume products because the company could get them to market much faster, minimize lost sales, and keep inventories down for many low-volume SKUs. Moreover, the products tended to require more specialized manufacturing processes (in which the highly skilled US workforce excelled) and thus gave the company a chance to differentiate itself in a crowded market.
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However, the company didn’t just reallocate production resources. In tandem, it changed its information and planning processes significantly. For the portfolio’s most volatile SKUs (the ones now produced in the United States), the company no longer tried to predict customer demand at all, choosing instead to manufacture directly to customer orders. Meanwhile, managers at these US plants created a radically simplified forecasting process to account for the remaining products—those with low production runs but more stable demand.
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For overseas operations, the company continued to have its Chinese plants produce finished goods on the basis of long-run forecasts, as they had done before. The forecasts were now better, though, because planners were no longer trying to account in their models for the “noise” caused by the products with highly volatile demand.
Together, the changes helped the company reduce its sourcing and manufacturing complexity and to lower its cost of goods sold by about 15 percent. Meanwhile, it improved its service levels and shortened lead times to three days, from an average of ten. Quality also improved across the company’s full range of products."
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Está cá tudo o que falamos e escrevemos neste blogue:
- Mongo e a diversidade!
- Volatilidade e a rapidez e a flexibilidade
- Só fica a faltar a subida dos salários na Ásia e do custo dos transportes.
Continua.
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