Integration of supplier and manufacturer using ERP and forecasting techniques in a supply chain.

摘要

Manufacturing businesses are getting competitive on the basis of prices and quality. Every manufacturer has to come up with innovation in the business to sustain and grow, but it requires a sound foundation too. It starts from a tight control on the input and maximum output. Supply chain principles and its coordination initiatives have a bigger role to play in reducing the wastage of resources and benefit of everyone involved in the chain. This research studies some of the most widely used techniques in the today's world among different players in the supply chain and tries to demonstrate it using a supplier and a manufacturer's relation. A simple supply chain containing two players is considered to represent the transactions carried out in a supply chain. An Excel based model is used to study the demand data and to demonstrate how collaboration of these players bring out reduction in the inventory keeping and overall cost of operation. The research work was also done to study Enterprise Resource Planning software (Infor Visual ERP) and its scope in the supply chain for integration. A better equipped tool like ERP has more sophisticated software to store the business transaction in user suitable forms and to carry out accurate forecasting. Implementing integration framework is possible and facilitated by ERP packages. This approach can bring out much needed co-ordination among the IT systems in the supply chain, thus making it agile and lean. Two approaches are suggested to implement the framework in Infor Visual ERP.