The client
FlexiForce Canada is a manufacturing company in British Columbia, Canada which serves customers throughout the Americas.
The need
The client had been selected by their parent company to participate in a pilot project for implementing demand-driven material requirements planning. A piece of custom software had been written, but more work was required to get it to interface with their ERP system.
The solution
I crafted a set of SQL queries to get the required information from the ERP system on a twice-daily schedule and export it to an Excel spreadsheet in a shared folder on the file server. A software application was deployed to certain users’ computers which read the export file and allowed users to view it in different ways to aid in making purchasing decisions.
Additional reports were created using SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to measure progress towards adopting the DDMRP methodology, and monthly snapshots were taken both from SSRS as well as the custom software application.
Once the users learned to trust the suggestions made by the software application, we saw a $5.7 million reduction in inventory carrying cost and a 12% improvement in on-time delivery performance. This was achieved by reducing slow-moving and non-moving inventory and increasing fast-moving inventory.