At Plantvision we support many businesses with inventory management. Here’s a typical scenario from the Medtech industry where our skills and knowhow help to deliver long-term value and fast ROI to operations.
The Challenge
The Production Manager of a Medical Device Company must solve an inventory dilemma to streamline operations and reduce wastage. The company has received an order for 5,000 custom made medical devices. These devices must be distributed to different healthcare facilities across multiple regions. Each unit comprises various components, and the manufacturing process involves strict quality standards. However, the company lacks real-time insights into critical aspects:
- The current inventory levels of components.
- The age of the oldest batch of components.
- Any issues related to existing batches and their corresponding lots.
Knowing how many products to order from suppliers to meet orders while accounting for potential rejected products and the company’s zero-waste initiatives is a significant challenge. Without a real-time inventory management solution, challenges like these can impact production.
The Solution
A real-time inventory management solution is deployed to solve this problem. It delivers benefits such as providing visibility of raw materials and components throughout the production process in order to determine optimal restocking times based on quality, performance, and market demand.
Detailed tracking of materials is crucial in the medical device sector to help ensure regulatory compliance is met. This makes the robust inventory management solution as it includes features such as monitoring suppliers, batch details, and production routes, as well as employee interactions, timestamps, quality test results, and more.
Seamless integration with existing systems also allows for accurate inventory information and an integrated approach from production to distribution. This helps prevent supply shortages and supports efficient inventory management, ensuring the timely availability of crucial medical devices in healthcare facilities.
Improved pre-production
In pre-production, the planner and the production manager gain real-time visibility into inventory. They can view material counts by lot numbers and warehouse locations and automatically notify purchasing when stocks run out or are nearing restock levels. The solution’s intuitive dashboards also enable them to view quality control test results by material, supplier, or lot. This data is easy to share with suppliers in autogenerated reports.
An integrated approach to scheduling
Within the solution, algorithmic production scheduling can be combined with batch management to optimize scheduling runs. It also learns the production schedule and uses pre-determined controls to automatically suggest and adjust schedules to ensure products are completed on time.
Reduced delays
The Medical Device company can track material locations, statuses, and any interruptions as they move through the production process, which helps to reduce delays caused by inventory queueing.
Predicting issues before they become problems
Operators can leverage real-time data to identify potential problems quickly. The digital solution provides equipment performance and breakdown metrics that support predictive and preventive maintenance. In the event of production line stoppages, material shortages, or shifts in efficiency, automatic alerts are dispatched to designated operators or teams.
Full transparency of production
One concern for the Production Manager has been the regulatory requirements of the products and markets. But now they can track materials throughout production by supplier, lot code, process route, employee involvement, dates, times, quality test results, and more. Dashboards can also be configured to create detailed reports and electronic batch records (EBRs) built on rich analytical data.
How can you get started?
No matter what you’re producing, from heavy machinery through to medical device or Consumer Packed Goods, accurate real-time inventory can significantly benefit your operations, saving time, resources, and money. Contact us today to learn how we can help you and take advantage of these benefits.
