Manufacturing client needed critical path items to reach its manufacturing facilities and warehouses to ensure that finished goods could be produced in appropriate quantities to meet demand. This was particularly important during seasonal upswings in demand when unfilled demand was typically lost to competitors.

Client's business process proved effective in managing procurement planning through a weekly decision making process that was dependent upon detailed reports containing inventory analysis, purchase order, goods receipt, bill of material, demand, and forecast data. Unfortunately, this information was spread throughout multiple groups and their supporting systems within the company. The preparation of these reports required the efforts of a team of analysts for an entire week. If any changes or errors were made by the team during the week, an entire planning cycle could be delayed, cascading into potential missed revenue. The client needed a method to reduce overall report preparation time and allow changes or corrections throughout the cycle without adversely impacting the delivery of the analyst reports.

The ADC team gathered the requirements for the system development project. We worked with the client's IT group to build interfaces to multiple supporting systems and developed a user-friendly application that automated the majority of report preparation. The system's output was identical to the manually prepared reports but allowed them to be quickly re-generated if any changes to the underlying data were made.

Reduced time and effort to produce weekly planning reports from 12 man-days to 1 man-day of effort each week. Improved turn-around time and enabled analysts to allocate their time to performing greater value data analysis and planning procurement activities instead of manual spreadsheet manipulation.