If you’re familiar with the phrase (Supply Chain Management), then you likely have a pretty good grasp on how many variables can affect efficiencies and costs and how difficult it can be to optimize things.

Even if a single person were to manage all aspect of purchasing, inventory management, requirements planning, and production, the tracking of information becomes incredibly difficult if more than a few SKUs, Vendors, or production runs are in play at a time. Add multiple users/people, ramped-up production volume, hundreds (or thousands) of SKUs, and large numbers of PO’s or Vendors, and coordination becomes the only goal. Optimization is (at best) a unicorn–without the right tools to track data points and provide accurate visibility to decision makers.

Xcellerated Solutions can help with the selection, design, implementation, and integration of an automated Supply Chain Management system that can optimize (reduce) your costs and increase your accuracy through:

• Humans are great at using intuition to solve problems by naturally relying on past experiences to optimize situations. Humans are capable of stunning insights and creative thinking, but they struggle with objective or repetitive tasks. Computers are slow to “learn”, but they excel at repetitive tasks with no variance or error–mistake only happen when given bad input (humans), or functional rules are broken that violate the expected parameters.
• Current ERP systems lack the intuitive learning capabilities of humans, but some rules-based AI engines are capable of looking for (and often remediating) predictable patterns that cause problems. By applying continuous-improvement principles to these AI engines, organizations can proactively find ways to creatively improve every aspect of the Supply Chain Management process.
• Simpifying Supply Chain Management is more about trusting your systems than trusting your people.
• Xcellerated Solutions can help set up Artificial Intelligence bots or scheduled tasks in your environment that will tattle, fix, or re-route workflows to ensure that major problems are completely avoided and that unexpected problems can be easily corrected and future-proofed. Your team will thank you for it.

• Even if only a few key variables affect your Supply Chain complexity, a full dump of the historical data (like a spreadsheet) will likely make that information difficult to understand–there’s too much detail to be able to understand without doing something to summarize or focus on key aspects of the bulk data. Software packages often guess at what you might want to see, but each situation is very different. It’s important to have the flexibility and capability to quickly and accurately drill down on pre-summarized and formatted dashboards, graphs, or reports to assist in guiding the users.
• Simpifying Supply Chain Management is more about trusting your systems than trusting your people.
• Xcellerated Solutions can help with setting up complex reports, dashboards, tickers, or even text messaging that contain targeted, strategic information. By using the most relevant communication and remediation techniques, users can have scalpel-sharp accuracy in their insights–good decisions become natural.

• The biggest source of data problems (in a modern ERP system) usually comes from the user that captured the original data. A good system won’t just validate data types (ie. a customer name in a unit price field), but it will also screen for problems that violate business rules or workflow requirements.
• Imagine a business requirement for a Vendor who has a two-week window between ordering and receipt. A good validation rule will not allow the PO issuer to request a delivery date sooner than two weeks. This saves time and headache having to negotiate a delivery date. (In a robust system, a PO may have 30 or 40 such rules that are validated during data entry.)
• Simpifying Supply Chain Management is more about trusting your systems than trusting your people.
• Xcellerated Solutions knows not only how to leverage rule-based validation engines in ERP systems, but we’ve also built many back-end screeners, validators, and notification systems that provide extreme confidence in high-accuracy transactions.

• When inventory decisions are reactionary, inventory costs are the highest. When all the key aspects of the inventory purchasing, warehousing, and production processes are transactionally tracked, then that data becomes available to influence future decisions. Proactive decisions allow for optimizing purchasing costs because the costs are understandable. When the inventory movement patterns and purchasing parameters are fully understood, we can leverage that understanding.
• Simpifying Supply Chain Management is more about trusting your systems than trusting your people.
• Xcellerated Solutions can assist with developing the right reports (at the right time in the right format) to help you find those key items that are costing you the most money. These reports will not only identify problem items, but can make recommendations on timing, costs, and quantities to ensure that bottlenecks in workflows are reduced or eliminated.