North Eastern Company (NE Company)* is finally seeing signs of new business. While they are excited for the potential, they are reluctant to accept the recent increase as a long-term change. However, to maximize their profits, they need to get the best possible prices, ensure all components are delivered on-time, and make their processes as efficient as possible.
An important piece of that goal, is effective and efficient material management. They need to be able to handle increases without exposing themselves to unneeded excess inventory if things slow down again.
Their preferred supplier Dart* is willing to bond inventory. This will provide better pricing and help prevent inventory shortages. However, NE Company needs to provide visibility of upcoming demand, commit to purchase all requirements for the bonded inventory from Dart, and purchase any bonded inventory that was reserved for over 90 days, but not used.
In the past, they have manually generated the list of parts. When the list was less than a dozen, this was easy. However, they would like to expand the program and it would be too time consuming to maintain the demand for several hundred parts.
How can NE Company ensure their demands are as accurate as possible? What is the best way to automatically provide future demand visibility? How do they ensure that all five buyers purchase the bonded components only from Dart?
*Name has been changed