Sanjeev Kumar Mishra
The Manufacturing sector has come a long way since the industrial revolution way back in the 18th century. Mankind’s quest for more and better made the machines complex and the processes governing their productivity, simpler and efficient. Concepts such as JIT, Kaizen, Lean, Six Sigma, TQM etc. challenged status quo and contributed immensely to the evolution of modern manufacturing. We are now at the cusp of another revolution of sorts popularly known as Industry 4.0 where Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and data driven approaches are going to be the order of the day.
While the above is the manufacturing world’s general progression, what it means to individual manufacturers in ROI terms is the big question given a plant head’s extreme focus towards meeting production schedules under sub optimal conditions, reducing waste, errors, inventory carrying and above all managing a large labour force and a diverse supplier base. Let us look at this from an inbound logistics perspective, which connects your suppliers to your plant. Being the first leg of the manufacturing process it is indeed a critical one, because any adverse impact in your upstream process can have a cascading effect on all the downstream processes.
- With a distributed manufacturing set-up of component suppliers, sub-assembly partners & modules, manufacturers face issues with on-time availability of all the requisite parts. An efficient transportation to-and-fro plant is the essence of an efficient inbound supply chain
- Managing their respective work areas and related suppliers, many times the coordinators end-up running disjointed, sub-optimal transport systems. As a result, there is no single point visibility and control, so the final assembly or feed suffers inordinate delays
- Inefficiencies in the system lead to unnecessary cost escalations in terms of excess inventory at the plant side & a splintered transportation enabling the supply.
A technology driven inbound transportation system can help you proactively avoid the above challenges, provide requisite visibility and performance measure at each leg of the inbound supply chain.
As Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying… “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”,
it is no different when it comes to the supply side of the manufacturing sector.
At City Link with our fleet of trucks and proprietary technology we address this gap and help you drive efficiencies in the inbound side of your manufacturing process. We provide you with instant and also predictive inputs (wherever needed) that can take care of your inbound supplies like never before. With desired inputs, at all the vital stages, you can now focus your entire attention on your core activity of production and meeting and exceeding customer expectations.
Please look out for our next feature to know how we do this….