There is lot of requirement of Automation in the Supply Chain ,however we need to have an integrated approach. Let’s understand traditionally how Supply chain works ,As we know that we have buyer and the seller for any product.Lets understand this by an example of OEM who sells car in the market.This OEM will buy lot of products from other suppliers ,so OEM is buyer and Supplier is Seller.In Automotive we have many suppliers and we can imagine how much co-ordination is required between buyer and seller.
Buyer has to give the volume estimate and accordingly keep the inventory of the vehicles at his end along with communication with manufacturing department.Manufacturing department of OEM has to plan the number of vehicles and accordingly he needs to plan for resources, operators, machine readiness and minimum material availability.Once assembly of vehicles starts then there will be continuously supply of material from various suppliers.These material supply can be locally ,from different cities and now a days in the complex scenario it can be from different country also.There is involvement of many companies,Many departments and many people and any miscommunication can lead to non-delivery of product at the right location and at the right time.
Automation helps to achieve the efficiency in the overall supply chain management.This needs to be done in a systematic way and accordingly we need to identify the non value added activities or repeated task on which we are dependent on the human being.Automation can be achieved by the combination of hardware and software devices.Traditionally operator or supervisor count the no of components produced but as per the latest technology machine will inform us the no of parts produced and even inform us in which hour we have achieved high production and even provide us the trend of production over a period of time which can helps us to take corrective measures to improve production.
We can do the integration the requirements and Project Management tools can help us to understand and documents and requirements and according business case can be made to achieve the objective,After that we can work systematically to identify the solution and implement it by doing Risk Management and making time plan.
