Improve Predictability

Challenges to Improve Predictability for Brand Owners and Contract Manufacturers

Driving predictability through your manufacturing process is a crucial foundation that underpins many key corporate initiatives. Lean inventory, just-in-time manufacturing, demand-driven supply chain programs are just some of the initiatives that need manufacturing and external supply predictability to be successful.

Unfortunately, manufacturing and external supply predictability becomes particularly hard to gain when production is outsourced to contract manufacturing, packaging and external supply partners. Both the brand owner and the contract partner want information from each other and they want that data to be fresh and frequent. Yet, information exchange is slowed down and scattered, because connections between the two parties rely on phone, FAX and email. The contract manufacturer needs materials delivered on time or production start will lag. The quality review process requires engagement on both sides but where is the visibility on who owns the next action? The brand owner and external supply organization has customers waiting deliveries but has little end-to-end visibility across the entire production lifecycle. In effect, too many black holes exist on both sides to provide truly predictable manufacturing and supply.

How TraceLink can help Brand Owners and Contract Manufacturers Improve Predictability

• Drive Right-First-Time predictability of outsourced manufacturing production. Leverage cross-partner and cross-site visibility into production status at all points from purchase order negotiation and production initiation to quality review and induction into finished goods inventory. Identify, analyze and act upon phases in the production process causing variability and delay. Improve collaboration between internal and external work teams by enabling them to share structured information such as order status reports and unstructured data such as notes and discussions.
• Increase manufacturing process repeatability from order to order. Synchronize purchase order negotiations between customer and partner, eliminate unexpected delays in the lifecycle, ensure purchase orders, material orders and production orders are tightly linked together and their status is visible across the entire virtual contract manufacturing team, and automate production status and operational reporting.
• Monitor and assess contract manufacturing performance. Improve production planning and near-term decision-making by gaining better insight of contract manufacturing performance. Analyze metrics on individual contract partner performance, study cross-partner performance on several dimensions and scorecard overall external supply operational performance. Enable collaborative process improvement between product brand owner and contract manufacturer through shared information exchange and analysis.

Next steps

• Try It Yourself.  In minutes, launch a no obligation FREE TRIAL of our Predictable Supply Suite. Create your own Process Link collaborative team workspace, invite and quickly connect to virtual team members, then experience a new world of production visibility and tracking across your contract manufacturing operations!
• Demo Production Tracking.  Request a guided PERSONAL DEMO of our Production Tracking and ProcessLink solutions. On your schedule, one of our team members will take you through our solution.

Explore More

• Discover Production Tracking.  Find out how the TraceLink Production Tracking solution can give you visibility and control throughout the entire contract manufacturing lifecycle. Go Production Tracking
• Experience ProcessLink.  Review TraceLink's innovative approach to connecting you and your internal contract manufacturing teams to your partners both fast and flexibly. Go ProcessLink