Consumer Goods Manufacturer Repositions $500,000 of Over-Forecasted Inventories to Personal Protective Equipment

Situation

The outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought its share of challenges as large companies, small businesses, and individuals continue to readjust under growing uncertainty between shortages of consumer staples, domestic and international supply chains being compromised, and the adoption of new practices to best ensure cost savings, inventory carryover minimization, and product differentiation.  Our consumer goods manufacturing customer needed to capitalize on the new business opportunities provided from COVID-19.

Actions

The MetaExpert coached our customer to read just their product mix,  a 5-month, part-time engagement helping departments that traditionally manufactured wholesale and retail products for the construction, home/office, and transportation sectors transition to new demand scheduling processes while concurrently adding lines of personal protection equipment (PPE) that are now seen in schools and retail centers

The MetaExpert™ started immediately advising these departments and established a necessary cross-departmental collaboration platform for their initial and ongoing improvements to further optimize their sales, inventory, and operations planning (SIOP) including:

  • Using direct communication to confirm orders with recurring customers to ensure on-time in full (OTIF) shipments
  • Rebalancing the risks of raw material stockouts against higher inventory holding costs for critical components imported from China and potentially shifting some imports to domestic producers to ensure no disruption in our client's production scheduling
  • Adding a common data area to the legacy IT system infrastructure to support greater operational agility with real-time information and decision-making
  • Implementing a sequence of monthly and twice-monthly meetings ensuring direct interdepartmental communications and aligned objectives of financial planning and budgeting, orders, and shipment schedules

Results

The departments became more adept, accurate, and efficient in accommodating their customers through the increased communication between all departments as they deployed new SOPs from the coaching and mentoring by our MetaExpert™.

Outside the lean procedures used to eliminate costs from inventory carry-over and non-selling products after the start of the pandemic, the MetaExpert™ completed the 5-month consultation successfully ensuring the client could undertake the same ongoing OpEx and SIOP procedures autonomously.

Return on Investment

  • Increased efficiency, communication, and accuracy in SIOP across the departments
  • Helped design and deploy a real-time SIOP data store to support more timely, agile, and optimized decision making
  • $500,000 of over-forecasted inventories eliminated from laggard product lines repositioning to PPE
  • Accelerated adoption of Agile methods and SIOP tools to best manage cross-departmentally under increasing uncertainty
Consumer Goods Manufacturer Repositions $500,000 of Over-Forecasted Inventories to Personal Protective Equipment

Project Details

Client Skills Required: OpEx understanding and deployment, SOP (standard operation procedure) development, lean, root cause analysis, value stream mapping, waste walks, program management, cross-functional team leadership, KPI development, stakeholder collaboration, Agile process management, JIT procurement, SIOP implementation, OTIF methods

Contract Length: 5 months

Support by MetaOps™, Inc.: OpEx mentoring and coaching

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