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BI Saves BILT from the Phantom

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DQI Bureau
New Update

With 7 manufacturing plants across the country, BILT, the largest paper manufacturer in India and Malaysia, was faced with the problem of streamlining the inventory management issues in production for the last few years.

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Since few of the manufacturing plants were integrated after acquisitions, there were lots of gaps in system accuracy.

The company could not account for about 22.5 lakh kilogram of working progress inventory from one unit alone in one week. Estimates for other

units couldn't be accounted for due to high volumes. To add to the agony, the company had to pay huge premium for insurance for the unaccounted

inventory.

The management had to take immediate measures to control such a huge disaster and also save millions of dollars in the production cost which was called for in tough competitive scenario.

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IT to the Rescue

The internal audit team highlighted that there was a mismatch in the system inventory and the physical inventory. That became the starting point of investigation for the management. They identified that there previous system did not have the capabilities to analyze the work-in-progress inventory accurately and thus, it was an immediate need of the hour to fix the issue by implementing the right analytical solution for the same.

The company evaluated multiple vendors and zeroed in on oracle ERP solutions with spend analytics applications and a strong BI. This provided them with 3-fold architecture that tightly integrated multiple business functions within a single database and the management could

extract real-time business analytics through structured reports using their BI application.

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The solution also provided the customer to do away with multiple data entry for a given transaction that eliminated any system error thereof.

The project provided an excellent application to the users to meet the challenges of historical as well as current stock mismatches without much effort and the best part was that they had do minimal manual work (that too optional just to override the application recommendations)for making the corrections.

Novelty of the project was the automation of identification of stock gaps based on complex multi-tiered business logic and then providing the ability to users to correct the stock levels without doing lengthy

manual activities.

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This automated solution was deployed first time in any paper manufacturing organization.

Gaining Momentum

After successful implementation of the application, the company identified 22.5 lakh kilogram of work-in-progress inventory from just

1 manufacturing plant.

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Users could segregate the inventory into different classes across manufacturing processes and remove the unwanted and physically non-existent inventory from the system. The operational impact brought by the project was phenomenal as benefits started pouring in even from unexpected quarters as the corrected data started making its way to different BI dashboards Since inventories are a core function and have the potential of impacting almost all other functions, the accuracy in BI dashboards data started helping all the departments with improvements in:

1. Inventory stock valuations across manufacturing units.

2. Accuracy of paid insurance premium for getting inventories insured in manufacturing units as well as depots, earlier it was either more

premium paid or less premium paid than required, both of which had impact on risk as well as bottomline.

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3. Inventory turns per annum.

4. Ownership among users to maintain correct inventory in system as now they had the capability to achieve this and hence no excuses.

5. Accuracy of decision support system for top management and others as BI application gets accurate actual data and is able to provide

correct dashboards and become single source of all truth.

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6. To top it all, increased productivity of manufacturing, accounting, inventory management, and audit teams as efforts to maintain and

audit parallel manual records went down drastically The biggest benefit derived was to achieve OTIF (On Time In Full) targets by the employees. Due to this, the employees can now track the actual work-in-progress of any order and maintain/ control the timelines for fulfillment of the same.

The senior management can also log-in to the system to view any information regarding OTIF at any point of time.

Information technology in BILT is seamlessly integrated with business.

Most of the IT initiatives are joint initiatives with business and are taken to gain competitive advantage or to fine tune automated processes as well as to automate new or left processes.

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