CC-02-142 COLLABORATION ACROSS COMPANY BOUNDARIES: SHARED INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Description:

With the advent of low-cost transmitters, wireless communications, and Internet technologies, remote monitoring of inventory has emerged as a powerful means for process manufacturers and their customers to collaborate more effectively in the supply chain management space. This paper describes a powerful, yet simple, Shared Inventory Management strategy implemented by BASF Mexicana with its chemical customers throughout Mexico. At the application level, the strategy consisted of 3 tiers – remote data collection, storage & access; demand forecasting & dispatch reconciliation; and business systems integration. As a direct result of implementing a Shared Inventory Management service, BASF was able to replace short term customer sales contracts with new long term contracts for each of its customers in return for remote management of the customer’s inventories. The authors of the paper were both intimately involved with the project, from concept through implementation. Roland Heersink is CEO of Industrial Evolution, the company that provided the service for BASF to securely collect and manage its customer’s real-time inventory data. Guillermo Guzmán, was the BASF Program Manager who reviewed alternative solutions and assisted the BASF sales team in the roll-out of its new sales strategy. The project was implemented in an extremely cost-effective manner. Two key elements to implementing the project cost-effectively were the use of industry-standard components and leverage of existing data hosting with secure web access capabilities. The same technology has also been applied in the refining and other industries – both for inventory management, but also for remote monitoring and troubleshooting of real-time plant operations.