Manufacturing · Procurement and engineering
Shortening supplier change-request review in an industrial manufacturer
Every supplier change request required an engineer to compare a new specification against the approved revision by hand. Requests queued behind engineering capacity and stalled qualification.
- Company shape
- $200M to $600M revenue, multi-plant
- Timebox
- 8 weeks
- Systems
- ERP, PLM, Document management
IllustrativeThis write-up is a composite drawn from work of this shape. It is labelled because presenting a composite as a single engagement would be a fabrication.
Before
The state we started from
Every supplier change request required an engineer to compare a new specification against the approved revision by hand. Requests queued behind engineering capacity and stalled qualification.
The decision
What had to be decided first
Selected at Target because the queue was measured and the reviewer already existed. The gate required that no change be approved without an engineer's confirmation recorded against the specific clause.
Built
What was actually built
A comparison interface that surfaces material differences clause by clause with links to both source revisions, and records the engineer's confirmation per difference.
What changed
Review hours per change request fell from 4.2 to 1.6, with queue age falling from 18 days to 5
- Measurement window
- Measured over 210 requests across ten weeks
- Methodology
- Compared with the preceding ten weeks at comparable volume. Engineer confirmation time is included.
What did not work
Automatic approval for differences classified as immaterial was withdrawn. Two of the first fifty classifications were wrong in a way that would have reached the line, so classification became advisory only.
Systems involved
- ERP
- PLM
- Document management
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Next step
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