Richard Garraputa, Corning Data’s JD Edwards evangelist, recently presented a primer on License Plate Management at Collaborate17. This article is part three of his blog series revealing the highlights of that presentation.
In the last article, I highlighted five ways businesses use license plating ineffectively. This week, I’ll share how one Corning Data client was able to use license plating and reap sweet benefits. Let’s look at a successful case study …
Premium Chocolate Candy Company
The client is a well-known manufacturer of premium chocolate candy currently running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0 and DSI Mobile Enterprise Platform 8.
- $3.7B International Swiss Company
- USA/Northeast Region/$500M
- JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.0
- 1400 Employees / 200 Users
- DSI MEP 8
Being in the food industry, maintaining tight inventory and quality control are critical requirements. And being at the premium end of the market, these are also a competitive differentiators.
Challenges before License Plate Management:
- Rapid Growth / Do More With Less
- Using E1 8.9 Storage Unit Number (STUN)
- F4602 Tag File
- Executed Moves Only
- No License Plate Integrity, Tracking, History
- Highly Paper Based
- Many Custom Programs and DSI Scripts
- Staged Inventory to Issue to Work Order
- Work Order / LPN Association via Paper Label
Before implementing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne License Plate Management, the client used the Storage Unit Number (STUN) capabilities they implemented when they first deployed EnterpriseOne. Release 8.9 made this basic functionality available. It leveraged a ‘tag file’ (F4602) and minimally supported basic inventory movements. License Plate Management.has replaced that method with more robust capabilities.
The very good problem of growth
The client faced the enviable challenge of very rapid growth, but like most businesses, had manage that growth without adding resources or impacting quality. The STUN capabilities had to be augmented by paper trails to maintain visibility and control. This led to manual processes, custom programs and multiple custom DSI scripts. While this helped track basic inventory movements at the pallet level, it failed to support the maintenance of the integrity of the inventory on the pallet or track the details of pallet movement and change history.
For example, multiple ingredients for a work order were loaded onto a pallet, which was then moved to a staging area in production. Sometimes all of the ingredients were used and backflushed to the work order. But often, the company returned left over ingredients to stock. The client had no easy way to tell what was left on the pallet and no simple way to transact to get it back into stock.
Supporting mixed lots of finished goods on a single pallet- a reality given the manufacturing process and lot numbering system- presented another challenge. Since Quality had to do sampling of every lot, oversampling was done to compensate for the lack of traceability of a specific lot to a specific pallet. In the case of quality issues, the company would require a larger recall on an entire lot since there was no granularity down to the pallet level.
Finding the right solutions
License Plating solved all of this. The company moved pallets of mixed inventory to the staging area with one DSI scan of the license plate. As inventory is issued to the work order, it is removed from the license plate with another DSI scan, and traceability to all of the remaining inventory on the pallet is retained. Moving the remaining inventory back into stock … BEEP … another DSI scan of the license plate. Scanning automatically records all transactions on and off the license plate in JD Edwards and tracks full license plate genealogy.
With license plating, the company saw several improvements in warehouse management:
- Reduce Transaction Processing:
- Improve Inventory Control
- Improve Lot Traceability
- Reduce Quality Sample Size
- Shrink Potential Recall Risk
Corning Data can help you implement JD Edwards and tailor your system to meet your company’s specific challenges and goals. Contact us today!
Richard Garraputa is a Corning Data enterprise software evangelist with more than 20 years experience in helping drive real business benefits from improved processes and use of technology. He helps clients grow their top line revenues, reduce costs through more efficient and effective operations, and become more competitive through improved processes.
