News

NEWAGE AVK SETS A SUPPLY CHAIN VISION: Zero lead time. Zero Admin. Zero Defects

10 October 2005

How an intelligent supply network is providing one of the World' s largest companies shared processes, shared information and shared success in an increasingly complex supply chain.

Newage AVK is part of the Cummins Group and is a world leader in electrical power generation and distribution equipment serving the power generation, power quality and power protection market segments.

Two years ago they set a challenging vision for the company's supply chain and chose Wesupply to realise their goals.

Wesupply is an on-demand supply chain solutions provider. Their goals were to shorten lead times for delivery of finished products to customers whilst improving communication with suppliers through greater visibility across the supply chain, enhancing inventory and ‘goods received' accuracy.

Wesupply started with a Collaborative Value Assessment - this consulting service identified high value opportunities enabling Wesupply to be rapidly deployed and to quickly meet the objectives identified in the assessment by triggering the appropriate elements of the Wesupply Intelligent Process Agents.

"Before Wesupply the processes for communicating demand and fulfilment information were based on fax, telephone and email' says Gary Cameron Materials Supply Leader ‘ our ultimate aim was to implement a collaborative solution that could ‘flex' allowing our trading partners, big or small , to work smarter by trading electronically with us".

No visibility

Once Newage AVK had released an order to a supplier they had little visibility. They couldn't tell whether the order had been released or worse still what was actually in transit.

Manual processes are notoriously unreliable, labour intensive, costly & inefficient. Newage has a particularly complex supply chain with high and low volume parts being produced both in the UK and in other parts of the World. For Newage AVK there was not the visibility and control needed to ensure that the overall planning and scheduling processes were able to react with customer requirements.

Newage AVK found that decisions were being taken in isolation with little consideration for the consequences that rippled through the supply chain. What was needed was a central access point that provided visibility, control and exception management.

Multi-enterprise collaboration - bringing businesses closer together. Sharing processes, sharing information, sharing results, sharing success...

By using Wesupply as a collaborative electronic platform Newage AVK has now improved the speed and accuracy of their demand and fulfilment processes, while at the same time achieving significant cost savings for all concerned.

Gary Cameron says: ‘Wesupply is being used to manage the sharing of forecasts, placement of orders (call-off and Kanban), order amendments, despatch, transportation and goods receiving - as well as providing real-time and automatic alerts for exceptions that take place within our supply network. This kind of intelligent supply chain collaboration is already several steps ahead of any EDI offering which simply moves data from point2point. Wesupply connects and then enables our supply network, allowing meaningful information to be shared with all participants.'

Both Newage AVK and its suppliers are now enjoying the ability to collaborate across the network, to form more agile and profitable enterprises. The benefits of a demand driven collaboration network have resulted in zero order administration, the elimination of booking errors, visibility within the supply chain, a view of supplier stocks held at 3rd party warehouses to name but a few.

KPI's set at the start of the project are now being realised.

Newage AVK plans to continue working with Wesupply to further reduce inventory and improve their ability to respond to fluctuating demand.