Driving Down Cost in the Supply Chain
Driving cost out of the supply chain goes beyond reduction of raw material cost. Though many of the manufacturers today concentrate on negotiation with their raw material supplier(s) the hidden cost of internal supply chain goes undetected. To address the cost of the entire supply chain we should not only look at direct material cost but also the cost of internal supply chain. At Epoch we looked at four areas in particular which include: planning/tracking, storage/delivery, inventory management, and supplier relationships.
Planning and Tracking
At Epoch International, a provider of engineering and manufacturing services to diverse customers in such fields as telecommunication, automotive, medical, etc., this challenge becomes more acute due to various sizes and diversity of production that we run daily. Due to the vast variety and number of components used in various product lines, Epoch realized early on that, without any ERP tool, it would not be humanly possible to manage the entire supply chain. Epoch has been utilizing Oracle EBS suite since the early 2000s to operate its entire business operations.