December 14, 2021

Patrick Pignet

Business case MAN: How real-time insights and JIS can change your supply chain entirely.

MAN Truck & Bus AG is one of Europe’s leading players in the engine,
commercial vehicle and mechanical engineering industries.  
An international giant with an enormous in- and output of products.
Because of the scale of the company, they contacted us to optimize
their processes and communication between separate chains and
locations. An important nuance, we worked on three plants: MAN
Munich (headquarters), MAN Salzgitter and MAN Krakow.

The challenge

To gain a better overview and to free up space, one of the most important challenges on all three plants was to reduce inventory. At some of the older sites there was no extra space for inventory, because any free space had been used for the expansion of production activities in the past few years.
We wanted to free up space and optimize the internal transportation flow via replacing the old SILS delivery with the JIS principle which in result adds flexibility to the production lines where trucks and buses are custom-tailored and allows warehouse space to be used more effectively.
The overall objective was to make the supply chain more flexible to respond quickly and easily to customer demand. In doing that we wanted to challenge ourselves to build supply chain solutions that could provide a higher degree of end-to-end transparency of all the logistic processes of all plants with a particular focus op internal transportation.

The approach

In order to acquire the level of transparency and real-time information
MAN needed, we designed a new technology; the comprehensive cockpit
functionality and the “360 view” technology. The installation of that
dynamic planning and execution software made information about each
and every step and process of the supply chain accessible at any time.
This made pro-active planning, synchronization and coordination easier
and more modernized the entire logistics.

Further, the “full truck load” algorithm we developed helped external
suppliers configure full truck loads of mixed parts for just-in-sequence
delivery. This not only decreased transportation but also made the
deliveries match the production flow which made the assembly lines
more flexible. Next to this we also implemented “warehouse on wheels”,
a new operating model for MAN. This framework made the inventory
carry less on-hand parts which made warehousing and handling costs
go down and freed up extra space in all three locations.

All these changes allowed responsive and last-minute production
replanning as well as a maximum visibility of the entire supply chain
and inventory which added business value and reduced costs throughout
all processes and levels of MAN’s workflow.

Our insights

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