Material offshore sourcing undergoes standardization

Page 3 of 3 Global solutions To deal with these potential pitfalls, the National Institute of Technology’s MOSS project planning team is working in conjunction with the Intelligent Manufacturing System, an industry-led, global collaborative research and development program established to develop the next generation of manufacturing and processing technologies. IMS has moved beyond the debate and is searching for ways to make material offshore sourcing work better for the supply chain. The MOSS project is one of the initiatives under the IMS Manufacturing Technology Platforms, a program of collaborative research and development undertaken by the five regions that make up the IMS: Korea, Switzerland, the European Union/Norway, the United States and Japan. Bob Kiggans, chief operating officer for the South Carolina Research Authority, was appointed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to head the U.S. delegation to IMS. He pointed to the need for improvements. “We estimate that inefficiencies in international supply chain logistics can typically add at least one full week in unnecessary delays,” he said. “This translates to extra costs in warehousing, expedited shipping costs and sometimes production stoppages.” Overall, an estimated 15% of shipments experience delays due to inaccurate or incomplete data. Material off-shore sourcing can help U.S. companies reduce their costs by 10% to 35%, which, when aggregated, amounts to a significant amount. According to the National Institute of Standards, the United States alone imported more than $1.3 trillion worth of goods and services in 2001. “Supply chains are plagued with uncertainty and an ever-increasing rate of expedited shipments to address last-minute shortages,” said Steve Ray, one of the NIST members working on the project. “Goods are handed off through faxes, phone calls, paper documents and a wide range of proprietary or standards-based electronic exchanges.” The project aims to pull together the tangle of communications and produce a consistent set of recommendations, drawing from many different sets of standards and protocols, Ray said. The project is designed to improve visibility, security, predictability, management of disruptions, supply chain resiliency and compliance with a variety of security measures. The project also intends to reduce trade lane uncertainty, buffer inventory, expedite shipments and premium transportation costs. The IMS project will focus on generalizing the results and developing and testing proof-of-concept validations, then moving on to production-quality industrial pilots where the techniques will be implemented with real shipping data and the commercial software systems used by today’s manufacturers. “By agreeing to standard means of exchanging the data, we believe all IMS members will benefit, customers and suppliers alike, by reducing these needless costs,” said Kiggans. And for General Motors, Honda and the other auto manufacturers, that overall goal of reducing costs makes for a smoother ride toward profitability. << Start < Prev 1 2 3 Next > End >>