During the late 80’s early 90’s I worked in the high tech electronics industry, more precisely ‘Manufacturing Supply Chain’. This was a time of great change with IT systems delivering integrated Finance and MRP solutions and the start of the ubiquitous use of desktop computing, who remembers using Lotus 123, Harvard Graphics & WordPerfect ?

 

But the biggest change in the manufacturing supply chain came from Japan, with ‘Kanban’, ‘Jidoka’, ‘Andon’ and other and Japanese processes and manufacturing terms  becoming common place.

As a MRP (material resource planning) engineer I had objectives all based around productivity, reducing costs and improving the time taken to deliver products to customers. eg.

• Reduce inventory costs by $$$
• Reduce delivery time to customers by X weeks
• Increase throughput / productivity by Y
• Improve customer satisfaction and quality x%

The objectives were challenging but attainable, by analysing the end-to-end supply chain and working with key stakeholders (suppliers, buyers, stores, assembly lines and QA) I was able to identify opportunities to reduce the overall product lead times.

These included:

• Process re-engineering e.g. moving to ‘JIT’ Just-In-Time manufacturing
• Collapsing BOM’s (Bill of Materials) and introducing phantom part numbers to reduce lead times by avoid the need to repeatedly book items in and out of stores.
• The creation of local assembly line stores for commonly used items to reduce the volume of stores transactions.
• Negotiating regular deliveries of materials and components in line with demand reducing the value of the inventory and WIP (Work In Progress).

The Delphix Data Supply Chain

Roll forward 25+ years and the IT industry has changed and matured to something unrecognisable, however IT has been playing catch-up to address some of the same challenges that manufacturing had all those years ago.

Cost Reduction

With Delphix customers are realising significant cost benefits typically seeing a 10x reduction in non-production storage,  a reduction in the number of database server and licences by improved asset utilisation and management, as well as numerous agility savings.

Accelerated Time to Market

The Delphix ‘Self Service’ features are enabling application development teams to reduce project time scales and accelerate time to market, by taking all the wait times and delays due to the hand-offs between the various IT teams e.g. system administrators, storage admininstrators & DBA’s out of the process.

Increase Productivity and Throughput

With Delphix application development and test teams are accelerating their movement from Waterfall to Agile, Scrum or Kanban based SDLC’s (software development lifecycle), increasing productivity and throughput. This is achieved by removing the delays and storage constraints enabling developers to get timely access to their own full size copy database rather than having to share databases and coordinate testing with multiple teams.

Improved Quality and Customer Satisfaction

Application development teams that have embraced Delphix are seeing the benefits of using full size data sets, with visible improvements in quality and customer satisfaction measures, a reduction in the volume of Production incidents and enhanced MTTR (mean time to resolve) for data related problems. 

Manufacturing & Data Supply Chain

In the table below you can see the business drivers and objectives are common for both Manufacturing and the Data Supply Chain, what’s change now is for the first time we have the tools and processes in place to deliver an end to end Data Supply Chain solution.