The manufacturing and supply chain is full of unexpected situations and COVID just brought tons of new challenges to manufacturers, suppliers, and contractors worldwide.
The industry was already full of a lot of challenges and is now facing new ones – shutdowns, a surge of demands, and many others are making it so that manufacturers have to rely on more efficient ways of doing things.
What’s The Solution?
How can companies deal with these challenges? That’s the question everyone has on their mind these days.
How will we be able to control the cost, demand, connectivity to e-commerce, and many other areas of development and manufacturing?
Investing in technology is the ultimate answer.
However, companies are busy, so how do we approach technology in the right way to ensure that we choose the right tools?
Today, I want to talk about how SaaS tools and distributed data management technologies are helping the manufacturing industry as a whole.
IT loads and SaaS technologies
Traditionally, investment in technology and data management was a long process, which includes technology evaluation, testing, implementation, and training.
The IT is a critical element in this process because they need to support, install and maintain the solution in-house. The new opportunity is to shift to SaaS technologies and products.
These solutions are available on-demand with no or very little IT support needed making it that much easier to integrate a new system into your workflow.
Check the true SaaS solutions allowing you instant registration and flexible pricing plans with monthly options. It gives you all pros and flexibility needed in uncertain times.
Communication between companies and data availability is critical
The supply chain is tricky because it requires information from multiple sources to be combined and work smoothly.
Old fashioned tools are usually deployed for each company while interaction between them is still happening using emails and old fashion Excel spreadsheets.
While it helps to solve some problems, the communication is slow and prone to errors. What if you got the wrong Excel? Consistent visibility from your supplier and contractors, connection to retain channels are extremely important. This helps with manufacturing and demand planning.
Choosing the right solution to help contractors and suppliers to share real-time information about components, materials, and other resources is extremely important and can be achieved using modern multi-tenant SaaS tools supporting data sharing and collaboration.
Make Use of Data For Future Planning
Using data to tune the overall system performance such as cost and availability is a huge factor that can make your operation feasible and profitable.
How do you achieve it?
Simple, You need to figure out how to organize the data streams and processes between all companies and deploy tools that allows you to provide information about important data pieces – components, cost, availability, lead time, product characteristics, and others.
Investing in tools that are capable of connecting suppliers and contractors with the information above is the way to go. Having the information on demand will allow you to make quick decisions in case changes are needed and support your strategic planning.
Use Case In Place – OpenBOM E-commerce Customer Story
We have a customer working in online retail focusing on how to make the most agile operation and cost forecasting possible depending on many sources of suppliers for materials and resources.
Check out their story online – OpenBOM to drive product configurations and real-time BOM cost estimations for a successful eCommerce business.
The important element of the solution is an online integration between OpenBOM and a variety of data sources available online. Combined with the capabilities of OpenBOM to manage product configurations, it allowed the company to be more agile and flexible to react to the changes in their supply chain eco-system in almost real-time, which boosted company profit and operational efficiency.
And the company’s leadership loves it. “Our reliance on daily commodities was a nightmare!” says the company president. “OpenBOM now drives our daily pricing both at the customer-facing (Shopify) and manufacturing levels. The joy is the component pricing updates automatically by connecting directly to our suppliers. Catalogs, connecting in a fairly sophisticated way to commodity daily pricing using the openBOM API. We Include daily taxes/duties/margins/exchange rates and other variations in such a way as to drive the Shopify calculator of our configured items, their SKU, and final cost.”
Conclusion
By investing in SaaS data management systems, flexible data connection with contractors and suppliers, OEMs can achieve supply chain agility and transparency.
Modern realities of manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution can easily put your company out of business in the blink of an eye. Getting ready for challenges and preparing your business with these technologies can help reduce stress, improve profitability and provide transparency to management to make key decisions.
Check out what OpenBOM can do for you today – register for FREE, get a trial and we will be happy to help you in your manufacturing operation.
Best, Oleg
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