E-Kanban: Blanket Purchase Orders and Lean Manufacturing
Blanket Purchase Orders are a "best practice" in the well-oiled
kanban process. They minimize the flow of information between
buyers and their suppliers, while maintaining the terms,
conditions and integrity of the business relationship between
the two parties. Datacraft Solutions
(www.datacraftsolutions.com), the leader in e-kanban, found that
while managing a large number of suppliers with many part
numbers, managing the integrity of blanket purchase orders
become an issue. For every given kanban release it is important
to make sure that: an open purchase order still exists, and that
there was enough remaining balance on the purchase order to
cover the current purchase. The new Best Practice was
"integrating the electronic kanban system" with a manufacturers
current purchasing system. Kanbans are now guaranteed never to
be sent to supplier unless there is a valid blanket purchase
order.
FAX KANBAN is NOT Efficient and NOT Lean
At ten minutes per fax, someone is spending 3.5 hours per day in
administration time. That inefficiency results in less time to
utilize more suppliers or improve the relationships with
existing suppliers.
Furthermore, even if 99% of those faxes are trouble free
procurement signals, four faxes per month are going to be
problematic and dilute the entire rationale for a lean
manufacturing operation. Suppliers claim they did not receive
the fax kanban; suppliers cannot make the shipment date
requested and expedited shipping fees are incurred, or worse,
there will be a stockout which will negatively impact customer
service levels.
According to Matthew Marotta of Datacraft Solutions, "Process
improvements with existing suppliers will further reduce lead
times and inventory levels and bring more suppliers onto the
system."
Datacraft Solutions www.datacraftsolutions.com Matthew Marotta
800-819-5326
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