ERP-enabled response management fulfills dynamic customer demand

A world-class provider of design engineering and manufacturing services for electronic products, BreconRidge collaborates using voice, video, and data applications with the world's leading communications, industrial, medical, and aerospace & defense OEMs. BreconRidge operates daily within a volatile environment, addressing a broad range of customers—each with its own unique requiremen...

By Staff November 1, 2008

A world-class provider of design engineering and manufacturing services for electronic products, BreconRidge collaborates using voice, video, and data applications with the world’s leading communications, industrial, medical, and aerospace & defense OEMs.

BreconRidge operates daily within a volatile environment, addressing a broad range of customers—each with its own unique requirements—and managing geographically dispersed manufacturing sites.

Given its priority on customer responsiveness, BreconRidge needed to improve data availability and analysis to support decision-making and response times in managing dynamic customer demand. Managing order promising and on-time delivery in response to order and forecast changes were urgent needs in particular.

Effectively managing engineering changes is BreconRidge’s ongoing focus because many of the company’s business engagements with customers are at the design and first-time build stages.

The ability to perform in-depth inventory analysis and liability assessment is key to ensuring root causes of slow-moving inventory are identified and rectified quickly, and that comprehensive data-substantiating liabilities can be offered to customers.

The RapidResponse solution, offered by Kinaxis , allows BreconRidge to drive rapid resolution to persistent changes across the supply chain. Users can access accurate and detailed information in an easy-to-use, spreadsheet-like interface embedded with ERP analytics and automatically populated with live data feeds from BreconRidge’s SAP system.

Manufacturing services supplier BreconRidge integrated response management software with ERP to meet dynamic customer demand.

Participants from across functional groups can instantly model ERP data to simulate and share the impacts of countless “what-if?” scenarios in response to changes in supply, demand, and product. They can then rapidly score these scenario alternatives against set performance metrics to ensure that decisions are aligned with corporate goals.

RapidResponse also has key functionalities not found in traditional planning systems—e.g., component to sales order allocation and pegging, clear visibility of projected delivery dates of demand records, prioritization of MRP exception messages, and business metrics and trend analysis/reporting.

Using RapidResponse, BreconRidge now offers its customers more accurate original-commitment information and supporting details for constraints or problem materials through improved “capable to promise” analysis, increasing on-time delivery performance by 40 percent in just eight months.

Actionable data is readily accessible to everyone who needs it, a capability that improved BreconRidge’s response times to customers for demand change requests by 80 percent.

In addition, lead-time information is delivered internally as well as out to customers with the supporting detail required to simulate and assess inventory-reduction options. With the help of the tool, manufacturing lead times dropped 20 percent and confidence in the accuracy of the lead time is very strong.

For one BreconRidge customer who makes strategic investments in inventory, RapidResponse defined the investment needed to meet a certain flexibility factor, reducing product lead times by 50 percent.

Says Glenda Paquin, BreconRidge VP of planning and supply management, “Supply chain management competencies comprise an integral component of BreconRidge’s value proposition. RapidResponse helped us achieve remarkable performance improvements in this area in a matter of months.”