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Improving competitiveness and profitability with executive decision support tools (CS271)

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This story is for CEOs who

  1. Need to control logistics costs and want a way to objectively evaluate options

  2. Aim to balance supply and demand by optimizing current capacity

  3. Are looking for guidance in improving their digital maturity


The Challenges 

Following a previous successful engagement with SGS Maine Pointe, a global supplier of commercial explosives, primarily for the mining industry, wanted to bring the same level of visibility into logistics, costs, and data to their Initiation Systems division. They also wanted to evaluate options to mitigate risks associated with their operations in Mexico, balance supply and demand across plants, and gain visibility into sales, inventory, and operations planning (SIOP).


Aligning data and decisions with business requirements

 

SGS Maine Pointe:

  • Provided an SIOP tool to enable leaders to balance supply with forecasted demand and to make capacity adjustments between planning periods
  • Improved their analytics maturity from purely operational reporting and provided the foundation for predictive and prescriptive analytics
  • Gave visibility into relative cost structures for products from different plants
  • Established data to use when negotiating with logistics suppliers and a metric for reducing overtime

Lessons learned for other executives

  • Reliable, unform data can be pulled from systems that are not fully integrated
  • The right analytics tools clarify major business decisions
  • Multiple factors affect the cost to serve customers, not just the cost of labor

The Results

  • Identified opportunities to optimize carrier costs, fuel surcharges, and other logistics costs for each product group
  • Gave the client the sales, inventory, and operations planning (SIOP) tools to maximize capacity utilization and meet forecasted demand
  • Built an integrated analytics solution that provided a major upgrade in the company’s analytics maturity
  • Positioned the client to generate logistics savings of about $2 million for Initiation Systems, equaling 6% to 8% of total logistics spend
  • Accelerated digital maturity by years
  • Provided objective analysis for evaluating decisions, such as on-shoring production
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Improving competitiveness and profitability with executive decision support tools (CS271)

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