Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
The need for Visibility and Control to achieve effective Inventory Deployment for Customer Satisfaction
Logistics has been seen by some, as one of the toughest jobs in service delivery. There is a continued pressure to produce the right part in the right place at the right time and as soon as that is achieved, the next requirement is to achieve this at the lowest cost, with a minimum of capital tied up in inventory. The backbone of most logistics operations is in the experienced planners and expediters who work to achieve service delivery goals.
They have always understood that their task is to manage the inventory and deploy it to its best effect. They have struggled with lack of visibility of the material at either end of the supply chain, and have fought to gain and maintain the necessary control to deliver the required performance. Effective and efficient inventory deployment has become, as a result, a fundamental issue in achieving the right level of customer service, cost effectively.
Increased scale, reduced densities and enlarged geographies have all served to make the task of deploying inventory effectively into a major challenge with many different types of trade-off. Businesses building different products in different locations across the world, or outsourcing all but their core components to various suppliers, require an increasingly more efficient management of lead-times, availability, quantities and prices in an extremely complex environment.
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