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This strategic paper examines the increasingly important role that customer service and responsiveness have in manufacturing as companies transform operations from Make-to-Stock to demand-driven business models. The paper highlights the cost savings that can be achieved by more closely synchronizing production and supply with demand.

The paper also highlights key capabilities that manufacturers should look for in enterprise solutions to help them become more demand-driven.

Most products pass through a development period during which time the data is very volatile. In advanced technological industries such as electronics, as well as most Engineer-to-Order and Make-to-Order environments, this volatile situation may exist throughout the life of the product. Additions to the product are made from time to time, using both existing and new parts, while other parts are deleted. Modifications range from a small change affecting a single item, to a design change involving a number of assemblies. The changes may affect the date, product definition (BOM and routing), tooling, inspection gauges, etc.

This white paper addresses the issues involved in engineering changes and how glovia.com functionality supports them.

Manufacturers are still recovering from the past decade's unprecedented economic boom and bust, but they are waking to a more formidable business reality: globalization.

While much of the news about globalization has been troubling-jobs and production moving overseas, plants shutting down, and a relentless, often corrosive, pressure to reduce costs-there are also tremendous opportunities as new markets are opened. Whether the ultimate effect will be good or bad, manufacturers need to accept that globalization is here to stay and it will impact-and continue to impact-their business.

This white paper highlights the key trends behind globalization and examines its impact on manufacturing operations. The paper also explains how manufacturers must deploy new information technologies, such as Supply Chain Management and Collaboration & Integration, to cope with the changes wrought by globalization.

Organizations must evaluate their businesses to understand themselves, the market they are in, and the customers they serve.

Especially true for high volume manufacturers, proper alignment is essential, otherwise they are destined for failure. Shrinking margins, limits in differentiation, excessive proliferation, endless uncertainty, the list goes on and on. Manufacturers need a strategic approach and a plan of action that will guide them through the uncertainty and minimize their time and costs in production. To compete, competitive advantages must be developed by concentrating on three areas: manufacturing competencies, strategic alignment and best practices. Before a manufacturer decides how to balance the three, they must first evaluate the current position of their business and the market and then determine which direction they are both heading.

Kanban is a Japanese word that literally means billboard sign. The term has been modified in its application of manufacturing activities to mean card or ticket. Toyota originally developed Kanban manufacturing techniques. The Toyota approach used cards as a signal that additional items were required to meet production schedules. So in its simplest form Kanban manufacturing uses a card to signal someone that an action is required to apply additional items to the shop.

The use of Kanban manufacturing techniques will help a company move to a just-in-time manufacturing environment. This then becomes one of the tools that can be used by a company to be more competitive in today's environment.

Lean, after decades of being relegated to the fringe of manufacturing, is now officially "hot." No matter where you look, every magazine, consultant, analyst and industry guru touts lean as the answer to whatever ails manufacturing. The pioneering efforts of a handful of manufacturers have established that lean works. Lean significantly increases customer satisfaction levels, decreases costs, and improves responsiveness.

Manufacturers today face new challenges in the form of increased customer expectations, shortened product cycles, product proliferation, foreign competition, and a moribund economy. Lean, properly implemented, can address these challenges.

So just what is "lean"? How can manufacturers transform their businesses to become lean? How can companies leverage their existing investment in information systems to support a lean transformation? These are the issues addressed in this white paper.

Making a real long-term commitment to excellence is pledging to deliver and continuously improve value for your customers, shareholders and team members over the long haul. The commitment needs to start at the top of the organization and include literally everyone.

Implementing Lean is one of the few cases where happy customers don’t need to be traded-off for financial gain. It’s also an environment where people pull together as cross-functional teams focused on making the business process work better. The high-level goals are to delight customers in order to increase the company’s ability to survive and prosper. This becomes very rewarding work everyone gets to feel great about.

The potential rewards are tremendous for those executives with the desire and will to allow Lean to happen. Unfortunately, some executives have not had the opportunity to get behind Lean because they were never presented with the business benefits, the risks and the necessary process to ensure success. It is incumbent on Lean team members, initiators and champions to engage with top management to keep them informed and actively involved.

Eliminate waste. Increase flow. Improve continuously. These are just a few of the many phrases businesses and manufacturers have come across when talking about Lean manufacturing and the benefits it brings. Lean has become a proven method for improving operational performance, product quality, customer relationships and most importantly, the bottom line.

In past years, repetitive manufacturers have had great success with Lean. Their ability to implement Lean was mainly attributed to the fact that remapping the value stream was straightforward, the implementation process was often limited to the factory and customer demand was somewhat more predictable. As time went on, the pressures that burdened these and other manufacturers remained, continuing to grow and magnify weaknesses in the organization. Today, increases in customer expectation and foreign competition are forcing companies to further drive down costs and improve flexibility in an environment where product lifecycles constantly shrink.

Many manufacturers are finding it increasingly difficult to improve their financial performance. At the same time they are getting decreasing returns from their cost reduction initiatives, they are being buffeted by powerful market forces-growing customer expectation, rapid product commoditization, and global competition.

However, manufacturers do have an overlooked asset they can leverage to overcome these challenges: their post-sale service business. Long considered a second-class corporate citizen by many, service businesses are finally being recognized for the valuable contribution they make to the bottom line. Recent studies have shown that a manufacturer gets up to 40 percent of its revenues and more than 50 percent of its profits from services.

This white paper explores the growing importance of post-sale service to manufacturers and the steps manufacturers must take—and the investments they must make—to revitalize their service businesses.

Project management has been around since the time when man collaborated on ventures such as the Acropolis in Athens, the Pyramids of ancient Egypt and the Great Wall of China. The idea and practice has been around for millennia, establishing traditional views and approaches as time went on. Over recent years, technology and the internet have taken project management to new levels and overcome obstacles that once seemed improbable. By revisiting the basic principles of project management, we can identify the shortcomings and the challenges most real-world business face and realize the needs of a manager go far beyond the capabilities of many stand alone products in the market today.

In order to understand the delicate balancing act that must be performed between the multitude of projects and the entire business, we need to go beyond traditional views and apply them to real world situations. Looking at the automotive industry, the challenges in the complex world of project management must be identified and discussed. By recognizing the challenges that lay ahead of these manufacturers, we can highlight their needs, ranging from cross functional teams to organizational flexibility. As it turns out, technology is a true catalyst able to fulfill many of these needs. It therefore comes as no surprise companies are increasingly looking towards Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to provide a comprehensive solution that integrates projects and there management into their businesses.

Many manufacturers have attempted to manage their supply chain more effectively through Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). Sales and Operations Planning is a process, not an event. This process is meant to develop and evaluate the numerous tactical strategies available to the business, choose the one that contributes the most toward realization of the firm's long-term objectives, and measure the actual performance versus the plan.

There are just three topics that need evaluation and consensus in most firms. Production is needed to support the expected level of Sales and maintain a buffer Inventory — PS&I. In manufacturing firms, Production is the major operations activity, Sales and Marketing forecast what is needed because they are close to the customer, and Inventory is important because it is a result of the interaction of the first two and is almost always one of the largest items on the firm's balance sheet.

Born out of investor outrage over the financial scandals of Enron, WorldCom, HealthSouth, and others, Sarbanes-Oxley was designed to ensure that businesses have adequate internal controls in place and that the information published in their financial statements is accurate.

While it is primarily financial legislation, Sarbanes-Oxley has morphed into a much broader operational and IT issue for companies. At the heart of this transformation is Section 404 of the law, which requires businesses to maintain adequate internal controls and financial reporting procedures as well as regularly assess and attest to their effectiveness.

Since IT organizations maintain the systems and infrastructure businesses need to function, they play a critical role in Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. They must develop and implement proper internal controls to ensure the applications they run, the processes they follow, and the data they generate can withstand audit scrutiny.

This white paper outlines the IT issues behind Sarbanes-Oxley, examines the steps IT executives can take to comply with the law, and highlights technologies that can be deployed to minimize the cost of compliance.

Millions of pages of text are dedicated to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. What is it? Why do we need it? How do we achieve it?

In its simplest form, Sarbanes-Oxley is intended to provide for a more accurate and transparent financial disclosure for public companies. Financial disclosures are produced from transactions maintained within the company's systems and processes, building blocks of the organization, but requiring a keystone to maintain the integrity of the internal controls and structure.

The keystone to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is to clearly define an application security structure that easily empowers individuals to complete their assigned responsibilities while providing accountability throughout the organization to minimize the risk of unauthorized activities. Glovia's standard applications, including Security Manger, Audit Manger and ActionDesk, provide the tools for shaping the keystone to fit your specific business structure.

Traditional logic assumes that all inventory is available to satisfy any customer requirement and does not allow for the separation or allocation of specific materials, parts, or in-process work for customer-specific use. The ability to maintain separate customer identification within the general population of parts and orders has traditionally been used in Contract and Project manufacturing environments. However, in today's customer-oriented world, this identification approach is very useful in providing clear identification and availability of materials for specific customer demand-even in Assemble-to-Order, Make-to-Stock, or Repetitive manufacturing environments.

Separation of inventories is not uncommon in Japan where a Seiban (meaning "a manufacturing number") is often assigned to customer-related inventory, work orders, and purchase orders. Glovia and Fujitsu have developed a unique implementation of Seiban-enabled MRP called PRP that allows the separation of product or customer-specific activities from the general MRP population.

This paper discusses the various functions within Glovia that address service as an entity. The paper takes on the subject in three contexts, which address the Service item itself as well as the after-market provision of those services.

Any organization that supplies a product is aware of the concept of service. That is, if your organization provides a product to the market, your organization – or someone designated by your organization – is ultimately responsible for supporting that product. This is particularly relevant to manufacturing organizations.

Since the 1990s, supply chain management has quickly evolved from new-fangled concept to an essential business management tool that has proven its ability to deliver vital benefits: reducing inventory, increasing responsiveness, cutting costs, and boosting customer service.

Over the same period of time, though, the face of manufacturing itself has changed, creating new supply chain management challenges that companies must overcome.

Today, manufacturing has truly become global. Manufacturers of all sizes have factories, suppliers, and customers around they world and they need new supply chain tools to help them manage these sprawling businesses.

What is the supply chain and how does it relate to individual companies? Why should organizations place priority on managing a function with seemingly limited control and visibility, especially when the time and money invested usually produces sub par results?

The supply chain has evolved from the simple days of warehousing and transporting inventory into a dynamic symphony of integrated internal and external elements. Managing the chain requires traditional business functions to coordinate strategies and tactics with supporting business partners for the purpose of improving long-term performance and bringing products to market more efficiently. Supported by logistics, this network is responsible for procuring materials so they can be transformed into either intermediate materials for further manufacturing or finished goods for distribution to customers. The only way a supply chain is able to fulfill its responsibility in a multi-tiered and complex environment is through the proper management of vital resources: time, money, and information.