vSRM – e-Kanban Auto Replenishment
vSRM readily provides you the required infrastructure from creating electronic kanban cards to having barcoded kanban labels printed by your suppliers to enable you to implement automatic stock replenishment mechanisms with Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) approach.
Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) concept, which came on the agenda as an extension of Simple Production philosophy, can be summarized as the application of its simple philosophy to our suppliers. In automatic stock replenishment method; the suppliers can follow up the inventories of the materials they supply on their own at the purchasing company, and ship the materials that drop below a certain stock level at the defined economic party sizes. This system, which enables the observation and management of the supply and shipment process completely by the supplier, is a highly influential method in terms of minimizing inventory costs for the purchasing company. The reason for not being able to apply VMI system at enterprises, which is an efficient solution that can be applied at many business places, include the lack of VMI functionality in the system utilized by the buyer company, and the lack of a practical and quickly implementable software solution which can be used by both seller and buyer companies to follow up and manage their VMI inventories.
vSRM automated inventory replenishment and electronic kanban module overcomes all these challenges in a simple manner and provides a structure on which you can easily implement the VMI concept. Kanban parameters, lot sizes and re-shipment points are determined on supplier and products basis. Owing to the integration with the ERP system used, the inventory values of the main company are seen by the suppliers on the vSRM system. When the main company outlets a material in its warehouse to a production unit, or transfers to a certain warehouse, (E.g.: to the selling warehouse or to the shelf if the retail industry), the stock level automatically decreases on vSRM system, and new electronic kanban card can automatically be created according to the minimum inventory and order point parameters indicated in kanban parameters. The suppliers can realize the shipment transactions further to this signal. Barcoded kanban labels that contain the information on the product can also be glued on the product and shipped. The main company and the supplier find the opportunity to follow up the stock situations, kanban cards, the materials shipped and on the way via the system.
The operating logic of the system can be summarized as follows; the main company creates a detailed shipment schedule according to the supply schedule. By using the Milk-Run parameters defined on the supplier and product basis (route data, shipment days and times, weight, volume, method of loading, etc.), detail collecting plans are automatically created. The shipment schedules are approved by the main company, and then they are seen and approved by the suppliers. The approved loading schedules drop in front of the logistics company. The logistics company sees all the required information for it on the system. Material collection lists which contain the information on how much material is to be taken from which supplier and in which order, as well as the volume and weight information of the materials can be printed out by the logistics company and given to the carrier. After the logistics company collects the material from the supplier, the supplier can perform shipment transactions and send the main company the ASN and electronic dispatch note. The main company can monitor the materials loading of which are completed even when the collection of materials from the suppliers is continuing. All required documents during this process can be obtained as barcoded.