Reducing Costs With Glovia

Glovia's extended ERP solution glovia.com includes over 70 integrated modules designed to help you eliminate costs, boost productivity, improve responsiveness and increase customer service so you get the most out of your investment-including a flexible deployment with a low total cost of ownership. The following are some of the particular modules and manufacturing strategies that have the most impact in reducing your enterprise costs.

• glovia.com Supply Chain Management
• glovia.com Customer Self Service
• Glovia Lean Manufacturing
• Glovia Demand-Driven Manufacturing

glovia,com Supply Chain Management
glovia.com offers complete, end-to-end planning solutions that manage your inventory from the supplier side, through production to your customers. Our solutions stress inventory reduction that will save you money and increase your productivity.

The process begins with glovia.com Supply Chain Planning, where manufacturers can synchronize enterprise-wide production and supply with enterprise-wide demand. glovia.com allows manufacturers to aggregate total demand and centrally plan the production capacity and inventory required to satisfy that demand. glovia.com helps you to consolidate sales, production, inventory, and purchasing information to help companies become more demand-driven. The cost reduction benefits are substantial:

• Increased responsiveness to market changes
• Improved visibility into aggregated demand as well as enterprise-wide production and supply
• Reduced inventory levels
• Improved customer service and on-time delivery performance
• Optimized supply to meet demand profitably
• Lowered inventory, distribution, and transportation costs
• Increased demand forecast accuracy with compressed planning cycle times

After the materials in your supply chain are planned, glovia.com Factory Planning — a memory-resident planning tool that simultaneously considers the constraints of capacity, inventory, tooling, and skills — generates an optimized production plan. Factory Planning supports advanced optimization algorithms that reduce set-up times and improve the flow of complex processes.

In a live environment, Factory Planning can re-optimize the production plan in response to machine breakdowns or unexpected inventory shortages. In a simulation environment, Factory Planning allows users to run and compare multiple plans to find the best solution that balances inventory requirements with actual planned operations. Cost reduction benefits include:

• Higher machine and resource utilizations
• Less overtime and idle time
• Eliminated bottlenecks and repair/maintenance impact
• Reduced inventory levels
• Reduced cycle times
• Improved on-time delivery and customer service

At a more granular level, glovia.com Material Requirements Planning (MRP) helps you reduce inventory material investment and improve productivity and customer service by getting the right materials to the right place at the right time.

MRP can be driven by the master production schedule to ensure that high-level requirements are consistent with the authorized production plan. MRP is integrated with your live inventories, work orders, projects, and sales and purchase orders to ensure that the latest information is always considered. MRP is also integrated with glovia.com Engineering to provide access to currently effective bills of material, routings, and item planning policies. Cost reduction benefits to you include:

• Multiple planning cycles with variable phasing and planning horizons
• Generate purchase requisitions and work orders
• Release contract purchase orders automatically with allocations across multiple suppliers
• Instant picture of projected inventory investment levels as well as projected new purchases in accordance with your plan
• Calculated value of excess stock available for analysis
• Projections can be made on any MRP cycle
• Validate a plan financially and make swift adjustments before committing your cash

Your operations are extremely dynamic. The most cost-efficient planning must have real-time information flow from your factories back into your planning applications. glovia.com Shop Floor Data Collection is designed to provide a real-time, mobile, or fixed data collection interface to glovia.com. This solution supports radio frequency identification (RFID), radio frequency (RF) and hardwired terminals, laser and thermal barcode printers, fixed mount barcode readers, relays, reader boards and other serial or Ethernet devices.

The power of the product is realized in the flexibility of device types, real-time data access, and the ability to handle multiple locations in variable configurations. Shop Floor Data Collection cost reduction benefits include:

• Customers realize additional glovia.com benefits via increased productivity, reduced errors, cut inventory costs, and improved customer satisfaction
• Real-time validation on employee number, part number, job number, job operation, location, P.O. item number, lot tracking number, shipper line item and quantity on hand
• Supports a supervisor end-of-day feature that allows employees to clock out quickly
• Fully supports lot and serial control

For further information about cost reductions through glovia.com Supply Chain Management applications, please see:

Glovia Supply Chain Planning Whitepaper

Glovia Supply Chain Planning Newsletter

glovia.com Customer Self-Service
When it comes to customer service, manufacturers face a paradox: make it as easy as possible for customers to do business and yet minimize service-related costs. glovia.com Customer Self-Service overcomes this challenge by providing manufacturing customers with 24/7 direct access to sales quote, sales order, and order status functionality and information through the Internet.

Customer Self-Service empowers your customers with timely and accurate information about their orders so they never have to wait for a response from your sales or customer service representatives. There are many immediate qualitative and quantitative benefits to this application:

• Improves customer service levels and builds customer loyalty
• Decreases support center traffic and lowers customer service costs
• Provides customers with anywhere/anytime access to order information
• Increases revenues by slashing quote-to-order cycle times
• Improves information visibility and accuracy
• Validates orders and minimizes downstream errors

Glovia Post-Sales Service Whitepaper

Glovia Post-Sales Service Newsletter

Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing began as a factory floor effort to streamline operations for large Japanese auto manufacturers. Over time, manufacturers of all sizes in all industries have discovered that lean principles can be applied not only to the assembly line, but also anywhere in the entire organization and throughout the extended enterprise — and on a selective, case-by-case by basis.

This is because lean is a process of continuous improvement built on the basic principle that anything that does not add value to the customer is waste and any waste should be eliminated for the customer's benefit. The manufacturer thus benefits threefold: through improved customer service; in reduced costs, inventory, and waste; and with happier, more productive employees.

In the cutthroat manufacturing climate that we are in now, where customer service has established itself as the essential competitive differentiator in the market, lean manufacturing has re-emerged as the most important principle and associated set of tools that managers can apply to achieve business goals. Robust ERP systems — designed to improve productivity, increase throughput, save time, control inventory, improve communications, provide critical data, and integrate operations — can play a powerful and profitable role in today's lean initiatives.

Glovia Lean Manufacturing Whitepaper

Glovia Lean Manufacturing Newsletter

Demand-Driven Manufacturing
To remain competitive, many manufacturers are revamping their supply chain to become more demand-driven. At the heart of this effort, they are searching for ways to reduce costs, increase visibility and improve responsiveness.

Being demand-driven requires manufacturers to link their production and procurement activities more tightly with actual demand. To accomplish this, they need new supply chain management solutions that allow them to account and plan for enterprise-wide demand.

glovia.com Supply Chain Planning helps manufacturers increase responsiveness by shifting the planning process closer to actual demand. Manufacturers can then synchronize production and procurement activities with that demand more effectively and in the process lower costs, decrease inventory levels, and improve customer service.

By synchronizing internal and external supply chain processes, glovia.com Supply Chain Planning helps manufacturers transform themselves into demand-driven organizations that are more flexible and can respond quickly to changes in the market.

Glovia Demand-Driven Whitepaper

Glovia Demand-Driven Newsletter