Lighten up.

Roberto Michel, Senior Contributing Editor

Recessionary times call for business intelligence-based insight to lean supply chain performance

Maintaining a lean supply chain during flush economic times isn't exactly easy, but staying lean during a recession times is tougher by far. In recent years, many companies could count on steadily growing demand, but the downturn has sent demand patterns plummeting in many industries, necessitating nimble short-term balancing of the supply picture against current demand in an effort to stay lean.

"The challenges with lean are more pronounced with the current economy," says Rick Jeffcoat, an application analyst with Hubbell , an Orange, Conn.-based manufacturer of electrical, power system, wiring, and lighting products. "When we started to see the downturn in housing starts last year, our forecasts were no longer relevant because the demand patterns had changed so drastically."

To keep the supply chain lean for its Hubbell Lighting division based in Greenville, S.C., says Jeffcoat, Hubbell is using supply chain decision-support and event-management software from Kinaxis to adjust short-term supply execution to current demand.

The Kinaxis RapidResponse package, says Jeffcoat, takes longer-term supply and material plans generated by the company's ERP system and analyzes them against current requirements, taking into account the cross-dependencies among parts, multiple suppliers for parts, and the latest demand requirements. The system also has an event-management component that allows Hubbell Lighting to alert suppliers to necessary changes in the supply plan.

"We are using the tool to more expeditiously identify what the current requirements should be on the supply side," says Jeffcoat. "We communicate back with suppliers using automated email that indicates which particular parts are needed today versus what we placed earlier."