Supply Chain Management and Logistics
Industry: ICT
Equipment Warranty & Service Parts Logistics program
The customer’s issue:
- Multiple partners to manage, including downstream repair agents, freight agents and facilities
- Suppliers conducting functions outside their core capability
- Gaps in the critical path that caused visibility, tracking and delivery issues for customer
- Significant amount of parts outstanding for return and reprocessing
- Product write-offs occurring and escalations in cost
- Significant risk to end users
- KPIs not consistently achieved.
How Infoactiv helped
Infoactiv took ownership of the end to end critical path for the customer – which was linked to supplier contract KPIs – to ensure that operations were streamlined, tracking and visibility was restored and gaps were addressed, with a real time performance management model invoked.
Infoactiv partnered with the customer in the provision of its multi-party logistics network. This gave the customer access to a flexible transportation collection network for the provision of a smooth process, with in-built contingency management.
The Infoactiv team made the BEST cost / service / carbon decision for the customer up front – on a job by job basis – and then reported, measured and managed these outcomes on an ongoing basis.
Infoactiv utilised its hub and satellite network for parts fulfilment, service protection and freight cost reduction. The Infoactiv team also utilised its LOGINET system for the end to end management of these programs and to deliver true ‘real time’ exception management.
Infoactiv’s Exception Management system ensures proactive follow up across the end to end critical path. This meant that, if at any stage in the process an activity or milestone was not being met, the LOGINET system exception management capability flagged the issue.
The Infoactiv team was then alerted to the exception and were able to action the issue and work with the relevant vendors to mange the situation. This enabled the smoothing out of the entire supply chain process – without any need for customer involvement and with nil impact to the end user
Significant automation was also achieved, together with comprehensive reporting and analysis. This helped the customer to meet its after sale commitments to end users, reduce their risk, target cost reduction and manage their inventory.
Other support services offered:
- Daily stock operational requirements
- Stock consumption and SOH reporting on a daily and monthly basis
- Alternative parts selection to ensure in-state solution reducing costs, time taken to deliver onsite and more efficient stock rotation and consumption
- Process re-engineering and logistics solutions that reduced the cost and improved the efficiency of onsite service requirements to the customer
- Management of repair lifecycle for large components – screens and printing unit
- Customer direct requests for parts, to enable reduced equipment downtime and technical onsite service costs for specific equipment maintenance
- Downstream recycling and asset disposition services.
The benefits delivered to the customer:
- The customer went from having 70% of outstanding assets across the supply chain down to 6%.
- The automated supply chain delivered enormous cost benefits to the customer across the supply chain.
- The customer was able to be more proactive in response times to their customers.
- The customer was not impacted by any issues that arose across the supply chain.
- The model changed from a traditional logistics pipeline to a real time procurement and performance management solution that was proactive and responsive.
- The customer was able to access more suppliers via the Infoactiv multi-party logistics (MPL) network and could take advantage of greater cost savings, competitiveness and contingency measures.
- The customer was not beholden to any one supplier and could make changes to its network based on its business needs with ease.
- The customer could independently identify where any bottlenecks were and could address them with Infoactiv as its support partner.
- The customer’s new system automated and tracked all outbound and inbound activity right across the program.
- The customer didn’t have to sacrifice market choice in order to implement an integrated solution.
