Monday, October 03, 2005

Information Flow - Manufacturing Unit

Dear members,

My topic for thesis is the information flow in the supply chain management. Specifically, its the manufacturing unit, I am mostly concerned. In a manufacturing unit, if you have many products and many suppliers required, then there should be something to keep track of the inventory. Now a days we have J2EE platform, IMS platform which are helpful in the efforts. But small manufacturing companies may have some constraints and they may not use these technologies.

In my thesis , I am designing a software which will have two policies, ( Q,R) Policy and (s,S ) Policy with which we can decide the order size, locations(Suppliers) . There are few things which are never considered in the research such as Physical Inventory, Database Inventory,Actual Inventory & Lost Customers. Sometimes the databse shows that you have enough inventroy in the warehouse but you don't have it in reality, sometimes there is Physical inventory available in the warehouse and you assume that all that can be used for deliveries but few of that inventory may have been assigned to somebody else. Hence these sort of uncertainites creat problems in fulfilling the demand and gaining the profit. You may lose many customers. Its assumed that the information we get from the warehouse is the most upadated one and decisons of delivery and order are taken on the basis of that information. Also the cost of updating the inventory may differ depending upon the policy whether its updated daily , weekly or monthly.

This uncertainity in the inventory management combined with the costs related such as Order Cost , Database Update Cost , Backorder Cost , Holding Cost , Delivery Cost affect the Total cost or profit of the Manufacturing unit. In the software I am designing , I am working on the lines so that you get to know the Change in the "Total Cost" and the "Total Customers Lost" with your change in , Inventory Policy Decison( Q,R or s,S Policy), Databse update decison, Order Decison ( to supplier) , Delivery Decison ( to Customer) .

My effort is to make the software userfriendly ( Many products , Many Suppliers, Many Markets - case) and very affordable.

Any suggestions are welcome. Please let me know your comments.

Thanks.

Yogeshwar D. Suryawanshi