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4flow consulting offers consulting services for companies that wish to optimize their inventory throughout the supply chain.
The Challenge
Typical symptoms that call for action when it comes to optimizing inventory are:
- high inventory levels and door-to-door times tie up capital, increase process costs and decrease flexibility,
- intransparency of inventory throughout the network,
- Bullwhip-effect: inventory explodes within the supply chain,
- local, uncoordinated inventories in the production and distribution network,
- no corporate inventory management throughout the value-add chain of partners,
- insufficient systems support in planning and scheduling,
- no integration of planning and scheduling into the upstream and downstream processes,
- application of unsuitable scheduling techniques and parametrization, and
- non existent operations scheduling.
Our Approach
4flow consulting is familiar with the critical success factors when optimizing inventory and assists companies starting from the initial analysis up through the implementation:
- Design of an business process model and analysis of the planning and control processes,
- analysis of inventory and cycle times,
- identification of potentials,
- development of measures to decrease inventory, for example consistent revision of scheduling parameters, introduction of VMI and consignment warehouses, installation of operational scheduling workflows and systems as well as integration of planning and control,
- creation and priortization of packages of measures,
- implementation planning,
- realization of quick-wins, and
- change management.
When there is a large volume, automatic software tools are employed to revise the parameters of the scheduling systems. These tools - developed by 4flow - have been succesfully used many times already.
Results
Typical results that 4flow consulting achieves for its customers by selecting an IT-system are:
- reduction of inventory throughout the supply chain by up to 50 %,
- realization of the first inventory reduction already during the project. (quick-wins).
 - Example for realized inventory reduction within the scope of a 4flow consulting project
Besides other results are achieved, e.g.:
- Transparency of the inventory throughout the supply chain,
- introduction of overall inventory targets and design of integrated planning and scheduling processes including partners, as well as
- reorganization of inventory liability.
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