Sunday, September 28, 2014

Technology in Supply Chain - examples from Walmart, AirSupply


Automating all the supply chain operations from forecasting to distribution and linking every element of the processes through technology is the increasing trend in SCM. Cloud is here to stay with multiple partners entering into SCM who lack expertise or funding to connect to other operating SCM systems. And with technology its easy to connect with order processing, inventory management and warehousing systems better.
Through a combination of distribution practices, truck fleet management and technological innovations, Wal-Mart not only became the model of supply chain efficiency and used it to become the largest retailer and private sector employer in the world. Wal-Mart reaped a lot of benefits of its supply chain management in time saved, faster inventory turnover increased warehouse space and acuurate forecasting of inventory levels. 


Companies like FMC Technologies have rightly gauged the industry demands for the energy sector and provide IT solutions with following objectives : 

Complete leverage of global spend to achieve superior Safety Quality Delivery Cost
Identify world class suppliers that will serve FMC Technologies well globally and grow the business
Develop strong long term supplier agreement based on Global Purchasing Terms
Meet local content requirements through supplier development
Influence product design to achieve higher quality and lower total cost from the supply baseManaging these with the leverage of IT solutions just makes it lot easier. 
The revolution is in the airspace airbus assembly line and the whole aerospace industry. Parts are coming from all over the world being mindful of quality, time constraints and coordination between customers and suppliers. The European industry has dealt with this well with an airsupply platform to boost aerospace cross company collaboration. AirSupply digital has provided easy to use state of art web technology according to individual user s needs. It enables future demand planning and long term planning for entire supply chain. 
Lets talk about RFID technology for supply chain : 

It would be very time consuming to monitor processes in the production stage which means MONEY lost in the time consuming process. With RFID readers and transponder they communicate with each other seamlessly. Data trasnfer, transport and sorting all are monitored through this. Also tracking the merchandise on their delivery is more efficient and easy. This has reduced the manually time consuming process. The storage position of each product is tracked through RFID and error is indicated if wrong place is selected for a product in the inventory. 
Handling incoming goods is labor intensive and not the best way to go about for tracking. In future RFID will simplify the way the retailers store the products in their warehouse.






1 comment:

  1. Supply chain managers must work in a way to make the supply chain more attractive to the workers.
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