Utilizing Supply Chain management best practices is vital to Acme Industries and to our OEM customers as well. Therefore, it is important to review what the best practices are that can have the most impact on optimizing favorable Supply Chain outcomes.
Starting with the external side of Supply Chain management, the performance of the supplier has to take priority over relationships or having possession of patterns or tooling. Too often suppliers can be allowed to underperform when what matters most is for them to deliver on time with perfect quality. Suppliers need to be topgraded, just like team members within an organization, if we expect to perform well for our customers. Proactively asking suppliers to reach the highest level of performance and to continuously improve, including finding ways to reduce costs and sharing those cost reductions with Acme so that we can share them with our customer, is our standard operating procedure. If appropriate, a recommendation is made to our customer to change suppliers followed by close coordination so the transition goes well.
Another important external aspect of Supply Chain management is to have an established set of strategic partners that can complement and build on the strengths of Acme Industries. The flexibility to handle the dynamic needs of our customers at times requires a way to quickly add capacity or another type of manufacturing capability. In order to be responsive, these strategic partnerships need to have been arranged with trusted partners and tested with past demonstrated superior performance.
Internally, Acme Industries’ Supply Chain organization brings a strong set of skills and experience to its tasks. The ability to evaluate and manage the supply base on the basis of technical capability, quality systems, production facilities, and administrative interfaces by Acme’s purchasing, quality, scheduling and customer service personnel leads to successful results for our customers. One of the many tools available to our team is an ERP system module that analyzes the balance between the load and capacity, as described in the Balancing Load and Capacity blog post. This tool, which was developed based upon Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, helps manage both internal and external resources so that dynamic changes in business levels do not cause a deterioration of on-time delivery to our customers.
Many of Acme Industries’ successful outcomes entail taking on our customers’ Supply Chain challenges so they can focus on other strategic objectives. Bringing Supply Chain management best practices to our customers’ issues enables Acme Industries to deliver on its Beyond Precision Value Promise and provide optimum outcomes to its customers.