How Much Inventory Do You Really Need? A few years ago, I implemented an SAP? ERP system for a subsidiary of an Australian arms manufacturer. The company was setting up a manufacturing plant in Tucson, AZ. The Iraq war was at its peak. It was mandatory that the company manufacture their product in America, and they needed to ramp up production fast to produce enough to support our forces in Iraq. During a requirements-gathering workshop, the plant manager told me that companies producing similar products turn their inventories at three. He wanted to turn his at six. What processes did he need to make that a reality? (As you probably know, a ?turn? is a technical term in inventory management that measures how fast you convert raw materials into finished products. The larger this number, the lower the inventory; e.g., a turn of four means that the raw materials procured today will get converted into a finished product in three months because the inventory turns four times a year). I had spent over a decade consulting on various ERP solutions for manufacturing enterprises, and I had hands-on experience implementing supply chain solutions for enterprises large and small that employed a

Seven things you must know before ??implementing an on-demand enterprise solution. After spending over twenty years implementing large scale on-premise ERP systems such as SAP?, I was very excited when the opportunity to implement ARIBA, an on-demand, in-cloud enterprise solution, came my way. Our? customer, a US-based multi-billion dollar consumer goods company specializing in a variety of chicken and turkey products, had engaged us (www.LeanAxis.com) to implement ARIBA for their spend management. I remember ARIBA from my Y2K days. The B2B space was hot. Companies like ARIBA and Commerce One were redefining the way enterprises did business. They were a challenge to the archaic functionality and outdated implementation methodology of traditional ERP solutions. Leading solutions, such as SAP?, were too complex. Customers spent way too much money on implementations, most of which ran over budget, while realizing little ROI. It was inevitable that some innovative upstart companies would come up with better ways of doing things and transform the business of transformation. One innovation was software delivered as a utility. You paid to activate it, then you paid as you used it, much the way you paid for home cable service. As with cable service, you could cancel at any

Why are we busy pushing?

Pull your plants for a LEANER Supply Chain?Today!

At one of my supply chain conference meetings I asked the audience if they would prefer to build to forecast and ?push? the product to their customers or wait for customers to ?pull? and then build. To my surprise, not a single person chose the former. Everyone was in favor of building to customer demand.

?So how many of you in fact build to customer demand?? I asked.