Explanation:
It is no secret that vendors often play favorites. The customer who gives them the most money, or they have the strongest relationship with gets preferential treatment. If you are not that customer, how do you make sure that you get your parts when you need them? The answer is simple. You must be faster and more diligent with your suppliers to make sure they don’t push your parts aside in favor of their bigger customers. It is not uncommon for several customers in the same industry to have the same suppliers, especially if the supplier has a specialty that everyone needs. Sometimes the whole industry heats up at the same time and all of the customers get busy and need the specialty supplier’s products or services.
The best way to deal with this is not to recognize when there is an increase in business, but to have it built into the companny's routine processes.
For example, make sure there are goals for how long it takes to place an order with suppliers for components when an order from a customer is received. This begins with how long it takes to enter a received order into the company’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. A good goal is the same day that the order is received. This should be monitored closely. If this data isn’t available, just visit the customer service department and ask each person to show you all the orders they’ve received, but haven’t entered into the computer yet. The customer service personnel may have many good reasons why the orders haven’t been entered, which include pricing issues, technical questions that need to be answered by the customer, credit issues, etc. The bottom line though is that if the order from the customer hasn’t been entered in the computer, your purchasing department, and therefore your vendors don’t know anything about the order. Don’t be surprised to find orders that have been in the customer service department for days, or sometimes weeks without being entered.
The next question to ask in determining how long it will take to get into the vendor’s schedule is how often your company runs its MRP (Material Resource Planning) software. This normally happens every night, but sometimes it doesn’t. The MRP is what crunches the data to determine when to place orders with suppliers for components. If the MRP doesn’t run every day, you will lose time before the purchasing department sees the requirements and can place orders with suppliers.
Next it is important to know that as soon as the purchasing department sees the requirements from the MRP system, they place orders with suppliers. The goal should be that every part that is needed is ordered on or before the lead time of the supplier. This will vary based on how much liability you are comfortable with because once you place an order, as it can be hard to cancel later if your customer order changes. When a customer has an urgent requirement, it is usually already inside normal lead times, so the order needs to be placed immediately. How long it takes a buyer to place an order once the computer says it is needed is actually pretty easy to monitor, but most companies don’t do it. Again, just like the customer service person, the buyer may have many reasons why they have not placed an order with a supplier as soon as they need to do it. They may be negotiating for a better price, answering questions from the supplier, or they may just not get to it because of their other work load. It is not unusual for a buyer to take an entire week to get through all of their buy signals from the computer.
It is easy to see how time is lost at every step in the process. The goal should be that for an urgent customer requirement, their order is entered into the ERP the same day it is received, the MRP runs that night, and the component orders are placed with suppliers the next day. If that happens, it will be your competitor's challenge to unseat your order from the vendor’s production schedule. If the buyer is diligent about checking periodically on the progress of the order, the vendor will be very reluctant to push it out in favor of another customer.
No comments:
Post a Comment