A leading manufacturer producing order based goods

A leading manufacturer of baby care products exports its products to about 30 countries. The manufacturer works on “made to order” basis and the complex manufacturing process involves multiple steps till finished goods are finally produced and delivered.

Saraff Infotech worked with this manufacturer to learn the physical work flow of the entire process end to end and created a technological workflow solution that provides a snapshot of all orders under process at any given point in time.

Client Profile

		A leading manufacturer of baby care products exporting goods to about 30 countries.
		Produces about 40 mn. pieces of products per year.
		Servicing over 25 different orders at any given point in time.
		Client service managers operate from atleast 5 different locations and need access to precise, up-to-the moment information of orders under process.

Need

The manufacturer produces over 40 mn. pieces of various types of finished goods in the baby care products industry, based on multiple orders from multiple clients. On most days, there are atleast 25 different orders under various stages of production. There are about 15 different steps in the order management and production process that requires about 10 different managers from 6 different departments and three different locations to coordinate, collaborate and communicate to ensure that the service level agreement conditions are met. In addition, there are about 25 prominent vendors from whom the manufacturer sources raw materials, services and parts. The need for client service managers to keep themselves informed of the exact status, to in turn enable them to keep the clients informed of the progress of their orders is a massive task in itself.

The magnitude of the complexity of the process steps, number of orders and individuals involved in moving the orders to their logical conclusion required a lot of inward-looking management effort. The number of different types of internal documents that were getting created during the entire process and getting stored on multiple computers within the organization made the task of compliance to various process checks and balances a very difficult thing to achieve.

Saraff Infotech's business process specialists suggested implementation of technology driven work-flow management system to provide a up-to-the-moment snapshot of each order.

Solution

The Saraff Infotech team collaborated with the client’s management, production, purchase and accounting teams to :

		Document the current end-to-end business process flow.
		Identified the “information change” steps and points that needed to be communicated to all concerned.
		Identified the step and information owners as well as “users” of the various information points throughout the business process flow.
		Identified a powerful open source work-flow messaging engine that can be deployed free of cost.
		Built custom developed, web-based databases and order-specific message board utilities, which were then integrated with the open source work-flow messaging engine.
		All the different types of documents created and authorised for a particular order could be filed at one location yet could be accessed only as per pre-approved, differential access rights of the different users.
		A unique “Process Management Cockpit” was developed to show at one place, all the orders under process and their current respective process stages alongwith the stage-owner department information.
		Like a relay race, each lap (stage) owner could write order specific messages on the system which help the next stage owner to coherently carry out the next step. All the while this whole “build up” of order specific message board is accessible to all the individuals involved in the process, thereby keeping everyone uniformly informed of the latest status of each order.

Benefits

		Coordination time, efforts and money savings estimated to be about US$ 125,000 per year.
		Enhanced customer service by informing exact status of orders to customers thereby helping customers to effectively plan shipment and onward deliveries.
		Helps each individual manager to plan his / her step activities in advance and prepare for peak volume days.
		A greater control over the vendor deliveries due to highly increased accuracy in predicting the readiness of steps which need goods / services from vendors.
		Greater compliance with service level agreements with the clients, improving the overall ratings within client companies, thereby securing more frequent repeat orders.
		Shipment planning accuracy increase helped lower the shipment costs by avoiding emergency cargo bookings and ensuring delivery dates as per cargo bookings in advance.
		Improved client relationship management as client service representatives can spend more time coordinating, communicating and collaborating with clients.

Contact Us Today to discuss how we can assist you in converting your manual processes into technology based powerful business tools.