Direct communication between departments, plant floor operations, and management is an ongoing challenge due to lack of real-time collaboration around actual data to help improve process flow and on-time order delivery.

Whether sourcing components and ingredients, outsourcing manufacturing to alternative suppliers, or staying abreast of changing market conditions, today’s procurement professionals need an agile means to evaluate supplier performance, identify new sources, negotiate best terms, and track order status—without jockeying between a multitude of Excel spreadsheets, ERP reports, and industry information streams.

A multi-national manufacturing company was unable to coordinate the work of all departments involved in the production processes. The company lacked both real-time views into the systems and methods of communication. This situation meant small problems could cause big delays in filling orders, and customers would get frustrated. Additionally, the business’s manufacturing process flow was labor-intensive and error-prone with manual checks on information coming from various departments using Excel spreadsheets. Naturally, the process was slow and not conducive to process improvements, nor was unstructured data (emails, phone calls) shared or saved for future reference. The planning manager wanted a transparent way to find out whether the manufacturing process could fulfill the production plan sent from SAP. As part of his evaluation, he needed to be able to: - Identify potential problems before they happened - Collaborate with coworkers around critical data points - Analyze the historical data, so he could continue to improve the lean production process