The latest edition of IndustryWeek’s Manufacturing Business Challenge is out.  It’s called “Buy and buy: the need for a cohesive purchasing strategy.”  This month’s challenge focuses on a manufacturer struggling to implement a cohesive procurement strategy.  As a result, they are suffering from a variety of problems:

• No leveraging volume purchases; it’s as if everything we’ve been buying, goods or services, is a one-off.
• Incredible data garble of naming and numbering schemes for procured goods and services, making it difficult to even accurately see our volume of purchases.
• No review, followup, and management of suppliers based on performance; we have not been punishing bad quality and delivery and, similarly, we’ve not been rewarding our best suppliers, some of which have moved to our competition.
• Lastly, with so many rogue procurement locations, we’ve got a lot redundancy of inventories and MRO throughout our plants. For example, we can get a machine part to any location within six hours, so why has every facility treated all their MRO inventories as “critical and must have in stock.”

Solutions are proposed by Professor Corey Billington of IMD (who was recently featured on our Supply Chain Expert Blog Series) and Trevor Miles of Kinaxis (a frequent contributor to this blog).

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Tags: Supply management
Posted in Supply chain management
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