By Natalie Burg
From massive automotive factories producing heavy machinery to 3-D printing startups, American manufacturing is an extremely diverse industry. Yet the one thing these companies all share is the need to efficiently deliver products to their customers, and unfortunately the price tag for logistics is growing. According to a White House and U.S. Department of Commerce report, supply chain costs, as a percentage of manufacturing shipments, grew to 59 percent between 1992 and 2012, an increase of 13.5 percent.
What can lower those costs and help manufacturers be more competitive? Innovation—and many American companies are on the cutting edge when it comes to data-driven supply chain solutions.
From making use of predictive analytics to leveraging internal operations data, American manufacturers are streamlining their operations to stay competitive in the global marketplace.
The App Advantage
As a manufacturer of flat rolled aluminum products, JW Aluminum has a unique view of supply chains. It has its own supply chain, and the company is a vendor in other manufacturers’ supply chains as well, from companies that use aluminum to produce pharmaceutical packaging to those that make rain gutters. Its new app, JWA To Go, aims to create efficiencies in both directions.
Before the launch of JWA To Go, it could take hours, if not days, for a series of phone calls and emails to filter through the right facilities to acquire a quote.
“We don’t mass-produce anything,” said JWA Marketing and Brand Manager Nicole Snyder. “Every customer has a specific alloy, gauge, width and number of pounds they need for any given order. So all those different permutations of what we can [produce] makes our scheduling very challenging.”
Rather than allow that challenge to remain, JWA worked with engineers and quality-control experts to painstakingly gather, organize and automate operational data from all of its plants. The company managed to turn that long series of calls and emails into an easy, six-step process inside a mobile app that customers can use to get instant quotes and track orders.
Thanks to that ability, JWA has decreased the lead time of certain orders from four to six weeks down to two. That not only streamlines customer supply chains, but it also has a big impact on JWA’s, making it easier to plan scheduling needs based on customer quoting behavior.
Big Value from Big Data
JWA’s app leverages operational data to create supply chain efficiency, but big data from outside the organization can be a powerful tool as well.
The technology company Savi has been working with radio frequency identification (RFID) sensors for years, tracking shipments within military supply chains. Its current solution pairs historical transportation data with real-time information and analysis to help commercial manufacturers optimize their logistics.
“We were sitting on a lot of data from all of those journeys,” said Andy Souders, SVP of products and strategy for Savi. “And so we started to refine our technology solution to where we are today, which is really the ability to ingest not just active RFID but really any kind of sensor.”
That means they can make more accurate predictions about the location of shipments, condition of products and estimated arrival time. Savi can also use this information to predict the best day of the week or time of day to depart to optimize fuel and labor time.
“On one specific lane on a two-week period, we were able to identify more than 700 hours of time savings,” said Souders. “Multiply that by thousands of transit lanes and thousands of shipments per week.”
Like JWA, many companies already have sensors aboard their shipments, so the data needed to drive supply chain efficiency is often already available. And one doesn’t have to be a big manufacturer to take advantage of these tools either. “We’re definitely one of the smaller players,” said Snyder, “but our leadership team thinks big.”
That kind of big thinking has been emblematic of innovative American manufacturers throughout history. Thanks to cutting-edge, data-driven solutions, these companies and others like them are running smarter and more efficiently than ever before.
A former downtown development professional, Natalie Burg is a freelancer who writes about growth, entrepreneurialism and innovation.
