60 seconds with...Jeff Stites

Jeff Stites on what can be done to improve supply chain visibility.

By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 11/1/2006

You have to start with the right people who understand the problems in balancing demand and supply. They will develop the processes that will allow you to understand changes in demand and how that affects inventory. They will also develop the right metrics. Then you can move on to resetting production schedules and capacity.

Information technology will help with visibility but is not where you start. Technology shrinks your timeline but it doesn't fix demand problems. That's why people and metrics are so important.

The real challenge here is the latency between when something happens and when there is a reaction. We've been working very hard on this as we try to better service our customers as their private label soft drink supplier. During the past couple of years, we've been able to reduce our reaction time there from 1 to 2 weeks to 4 or 5 days.

Our technique has basically been brute force. Data from the individual stores is fed into a database and combined with information from the DCs. Then we use algorithms to identify the conditions and generate new forecast signals for production.

We've just implemented supply chain software that will help us even more with collaboration and demand fulfillment. That will take us from where we are today to a new level of visibility on the demand side and significant improvement on visibility of inventory and in production.