Operations & Supply Chain
Operations, Supply Chain and Procurement are strategic elements in your company’s competitiveness, resilience, and ability to innovate.
Managing industrial operations and supply chain has become increasingly complex and requires:
- A strategic vision to adapt the industrial footprint and globalized supply chains to growing relocation trends
- Agility to face the volatility of the material and information flows, particularly in the crisis situation of post-Covid disruptions and raw material shortages
- High-performance supply chain based on digitalized operations in line with industry 4.0 benefits
- Actual integration of environmental, social and governance implication
Optimizing operations and supply chain activities implies several tradeoffs (e.g. service rate vs. stock level, local vs. global) activating the following 4 levers:
- Tools and processes to anticipate the upcoming issues in the short, medium and long term through early alert systems
- Collection and analysis of data to connect ERP information to demand, from market forecasts to customer orders
- Organization and governance to create an efficient link with the ‘extended enterprise’, i.e. the network of suppliers
- Skills and mindset from all stakeholders to support an efficient collaboration at the interfaces
What we offer
To manage your operations and supply chain, CYLAD provides an end-to-end set of tools encompassing client relationship, supplier relationship, planning cascade, inventory management and product management:
Our assets
CYLAD teams identify the areas for improvement in your Operations and Supply Chain practices, and provide an appropriate change approach, using proven methodologies and tools, with expert consultants capable of adapting to your context and challenges.
- A team of experts capable of understanding the supply chain end to end, and up to date with the latest developments and existing trends, in numerous industrial sectors
- Quick diagnosis tools for operations, supply chain and procurement (maturity checklist, flash analyses guide) to build a shared vision of the current situation
- Ready-to-use methodologies and training modules to implement procurement strategies, production schedules, performance or stock management
- Data capabilities embodied through:
- A team of data scientists and analysts
- On-the-shelf devices for demand management and supply chain performance
- Extraction, analysis and data visualization tools
New! Discover our Purchasing strategy handbook
Discover our handbook and toolbox describing our methodology for the definition of a Purchasing Strategy.
- Purchasing strategy handbook
- Purchasing strategy templates
- Contraints analysis
- Maturity grid
- Purchasing strategy levers
- Cost & Value analysis
- Supplier sourcing & market study analysis
- KPIs
- Management routines
To receive the documents, please click below.
CLIENT FEEDBACK
"I would call CYLAD again to have a flexible team able to solve complex problems, while keeping in mind the implementation achievability."
Head of Service of an Industrial Electronics OEM
Client cases
Program management interfaced with suppliers
Reducing short-term procurement costs
Planning Cascade for Supply Chain and Visual Management of Performance
Getting suppliers and partners on board with the program management approach – Aerospace industry.
CONTEXT
Due to new developments, our client must manage projects produced by its suppliers, which means:
- Finding the right balance between control and autonomy
- Adapting its method of interaction to the suppliers’ capacities
- Putting in place methods to monitor the maturity of suppliers in terms of program/project management
- Intervening in delayed projects, both to support immediate operational needs and to transform suppliers’ capacities
Our client therefore wanted to set up a team to support its suppliers with program management (i.e. project management in every phase of the life cycle, from design to series production support, via the series phase, with production ramp-ups).
APPROACH
Our approach tackles all five areas simultaneously:
1. Definition of a methodology to produce a diagnosis of the supplier’s ‘program management’ performance, and to carry out an improvement plan
- Three-day audit with a pragmatic ‘case study’ approach based on recent, actual results
- Definition of an improvement plan with the supplier to resolve the identified malfunctions
- Joint management of the improvement plan, until completed, via expert workshops: planning, governance, indicators, managing product modifications, etc.
- Operational implementation of methodology, with over 20 suppliers
2. Joint definition of the client / supplier interface:
- Co-building the working method: governance, sequence of meetings, set of management indicators, etc.
- Formalization of a joint ‘Program Management Plan’
3. Support with recruitment and upskilling the team
- Training in methodologies
- Training in Program Management techniques
- Definition of a skills grid and the related training pathway
- Innovative recruitment method, with a case study
4. Putting in place an approach to capitalize on team knowledge by collecting good practices observed from the different suppliers
- Structuring knowledge by sector
- Implementing the capitalization process, with regular routines for each end of mission and overall management
5. Putting in place support for internal project managers interacting with suppliers
- Setting up a community
- Sharing good practices to avoid reinventing the same solution several times
- Collection of recurring irritants to provide a comprehensive solution
RESULTS
The team was set up and now has 15 members, carrying out 30 supplier audits per year, plus the resulting improvement plans. This helps to:
- Significantly reduce the risks associated with aircraft development projects
- Increase the maturity of suppliers in terms of program management
- Benefit from cross-fertilization by proposing good practices observed from other suppliers
Revitalizing a procurement cost-cutting program – Aerospace industry.
CONTEXT
Our client is a company in the aerospace sector, a leader in its market. The company has launched a change project aimed at reducing its internal costs, including procurement costs.
Having achieved its procurement cost-cutting targets in previous years, it is experiencing a significant slowdown in the savings generated. Achieving its targets for the current year represents a major challenge, due to:
- The need to generate short-term savings
- Two years of previous efforts to cut procurement costs, by negotiating with suppliers and using short-term improvement levers
- A sector characterized by the difficulty of maintaining competition between suppliers due to high qualification and industrialisation barriers
APPROACH
Our approach is based on a combination of levers:
- Production of a smart data tool that will analyze annual expenditure in several areas and quickly identify new levers for negotiation
- Prioritization of negotiations according to suppliers’ backgrounds and business opportunities
- Automated preparation of negotiation
- Automated calculation of forecast gains, monitoring of negotiation schedules and checking of results
The tool developed by the team analyzed over 2,000 suppliers, 100,000 items and 3 million order lines over a 3-year period. The tool identified opportunities for gains such as, from price differences between contracts and orders, internal price benchmarks or price differences between series parts and spare parts.
150 suppliers were identified as sources of potential savings. Once the context and the relationship with each OEM/supplier was examined, 50 suppliers were invited to negotiations, prepared using the levers identified by the smart data tool. As a result we drastically reduced the lead times between analysis and negotiation, while improving the preparation of negotiations.
Finally, with the help of the tool, the team automated other time-consuming tasks such as gain forecasts, monitoring of negotiation schedules and checking of results.
RESULTS
The combination of business skills and Big Data capacities used in the project achieved tangible results for the client. Our business skills enabled us to select the relevant work areas for identifying gains, while our Big Data capacities enabled us to considerably reduce costs and lead times.
The project therefore achieved the annual target of reduction in recurring costs, over a procurement scope that however only covered the last 5 months of the year. The project’s return on investment can be estimated at an order of magnitude of 1 to 50.
Putting in place an industrial planning system to re-establish performance and secure client commitments – Aerospace industry.
CONTEXT
The company is experiencing a deterioration in its OTD (On-Time Delivery) due to:
- High, unanticipated growth in production volumes (revenue over 40% higher than budget)
- Restricted capacity of some suppliers
- Difficulty in balancing priorities between ‘OEM’ and ‘after-sales’ flows
To re-establish its service rate, that is under pressure from its largest order giver, and also to secure its growth in the long term, our intervention has enabled the client to set up:
- A robust industrial planning cascade: S&OP, MPS and feedback on actual demand
- Collective commitment to industrial performance based on the contributions of each Business unit, including reliability of forecasts, supplier development, adherence to schedule, productivity improvement
- Production management routines based on visual management of performance
APPROACH
Our approach is based on 4 pillars:
- Setting up a demand management process / S&OP (Sales and Operations Plan)
- Stabilizing demand forecasts
- Creating a regular, systematic sequence and schedule for updating forecasts and forecast planning in the long term (Sales & Operations Plan), medium term (Master Production Schedule) and short term (Production Planning)
- Balancing load and capacity based on proven capacities (internal = production, external = suppliers)
- Setting up collaboration and mutual commitments from the sales, production and procurement teams to the S&OP, MPS and PP
- Consolidating the procurement process: sending the procurement plans each time the MPS is updated
- Focusing the workshop’s performance management towards problem solving (visual management and QRQC), by following the sequence of meetings and indicators
- Describing the new way of working in a ‘Planning and Production Control Handbook’ produced in Agile mode: the initial version written in a few weeks, then enriched iteratively through a continuous improvement approach, resulting in gradual training of the teams involved
RESULTS
Joint implementation of the Planning Cascade for Supply Chain and Visual Management of Performance has significantly improved operational performance in six months:
- The OTD has increased from 68% to 92%
- The delay depth (quantity x days of delay) has been reduced by > 50%.
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CYLAD awarded by Forbes “World’s Best Management Consulting Firms” 2023
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Point of view
ZERO-BASED ORGANIZATION – An approach to swift organization redesign