Supply Chain Management Innovation Recognized

Supply chain management was central to many transformational business projects in manufacturing over the past year, the Progressive Manufacturing 100 Awards revealed.

Announced last week, the annual PM100 Awards honored projects in business disciplines as diverse as supply chain management, business model management, data and integration efforts, and education and training, which are among the eight disciplines that make a manufacturer progressive and help to create competitive advantage. For 2011, 18 of the PM100 winners hailed from the Supply Network category, which includes supply chain management projects.

The companies honored for their supply chain management expertise exemplify a broad range of manufacturing sectors and business structures, from automakers to tortilla makers, and from Fortune 500 luminaries to small and midsize businesses. IT transformation played a central role in many of the projects.

The winning manufacturers tackled a range of SCM challenges. One manufacturer replaced an MRP planning tool with a Web-based kanban system to manage inventory based on customer demand signals. Another used standard voice-over-IP research and voice recognition software to modernize the picking operations in its warehouses—and did so in 100 facilities inside of nine months.

The words of the manufacturer itself

In the words of the manufacturer itself, "One of the best decisions [the company] has made is to develop a best practice deployment model for S&OPThe result is that [the company] however has a very agile and dynamic S&OP implementation process—one in which they can start with a business unit and go from initial education to live in about four months."