Seeing the Future with Supply Chain Excellence
The global marketplace is being driven by consumers that are demanding more flexibility, more customized products, easier access to product information and faster delivery times. In order to fulfill these demands, a strong Supply Chain Management (SCM) strategy is fundamental for every manufacturing organization. Successful Supply Chain Management strategies are comprehensive, collaborative and connected, creating a seamless workflow starting from Demand Planning, to Procurement, to Production Planning & Scheduling, all the way to Inventory Optimization and Delivery Management. Effective SCM strategies minimize costs, waste and time in the production cycle. In this video, Marco Lentini, Practice Manager for Supply Chain Management at Engineering Industries eXcellence, introduces our industry-leading expertise, solutions and approach to help you see the future with supply chain excellence.
Full Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Marco Lentini, and I am the Supply Chain Practice Manager at Engineering Industries eXcellence, working from our Chicago office. I went to school at the University of Genoa. I studied Industrial Engineering and I majored in Business Management. I have lived in Italy, Germany, France and Mexico before coming to the U.S.
“Supply chain” is a broad term that includes a lot of different things. At Engineering Industries eXcellence, our practice for Supply Chain Management focuses on manufacturing, meaning we deliver solutions that cover all the processes and activities that must take place to determine what will be produced in a certain plant. So, we start from Demand Planning to understand what will be in demand and what we need to produce. Then, we move to Capacity Planning to understand where we can produce it, what we need to produce it and when we can deliver it.
Manufacturing companies have undergone a big evolution in the past 20 years. They have moved away from the “Push Production” model, where they themselves decided what to produce and what to put on the market. Now, they are moving towards a “Pull Production” model, where they listen more to what the customer needs in order to produce only what is needed and only when it is needed. But to be able to reach this “Lean Manufacturing” and “Just-in-Time (JIT)” concept, manufacturers need to understand what their customer and what consumers in general will buy.
Our Supply Chain Management team delivers a wide range of solutions that reliably and accurately determine what will be the future for our customers. While other practices in our company focus on what's happening in the plant right now or what happened in the past, we focus on what will happen in the future. We act as manufacturing foreseers!
At Engineering Industries eXcellence, we implement new technologies that help manufacturing companies to react quickly to whatever happens on the market. On top of that, we like to become long-term partners with our customers, so they can rely on our expertise even after a project or implementation has ended. For example, last March, when the coronavirus pandemic hit and stay-at-home orders were put into place all around the country, we received a call from one of our historic customers in the Food & Beverage Manufacturing industry. Demand for their products had exploded, doubling in a matter of weeks. So, we supported them by helping them extend the value of the production planning and scheduling tools we had delivered years before to rearrange their production operations in order to cope with the new demand and optimize throughput without a need for additional investment and in a very short period of time.
In the Supply Chain Management practice at Engineering Industries eXcellence, we like to be consultants first and technical specialists second in order to satisfy our customers. Thanks to a global network of leading technology partners, we can choose from a wide range of solutions from different partners in order to select the one that best fits each customer’s needs and priorities.
