Elly Yates-Roberts |
Seagate Technology is a provider of electronic data storage technology and solutions. The company’s principal products are hard disk drives (HDDs), along with a range of electronic data storage products.
Seagate has a vertically oriented supply chain with 575 sites for raw materials, work in progress and finished goods. It has three main business units, namely Seagate Silicon, E2E and Consumer. Although the business ran Oracle ERP, there was no effective system in place to optimise supply chain plans and align the company from top to bottom. With over 3,000 identifying part numbers and more than 190,000 substitution options as well as millions of work orders on a daily basis, the management needed better visibility as to what to make, where and when. The business also needed a better way to deal with supply chain risk by proactively identifying bottleneck resources, material shortages and orders deviating from forecasted demand.
Adexa’s combined sales and operations planning and execution solution produces executable plans autonomously without manual intervention, optimises sourcing, provides visibility of the end-to-end supply chain, and proactively identifies potential problem areas. It also provides predictive analytics to determine trends and identifies risks.
Optimised solutions were provided by Adexa for each of the Seagate businesses which, due to a common data model, can link together to provide full supply chain planning capability. Integrated to Oracle ERP system for transaction data, the system runs daily. By performing continuous planning, it adjusts the plan based on changing demand data, both short term and long term. Adexa also optimises the consumer business network for both the maximum use of available inventory and sub-contractor sourcing. The result is used to provide definite promise dates for customers and the build requirement for the factories.
With the Adexa solution, Seagate now generates plans autonomously, considering all the possible constraints, that are immediately executable. This has reduced the time taken in the planning process by up to 50 per cent. Misplaced inventory can be immediately identified, the root cause of any delay that could impact delivery can be more easily pinpointed and capturing 50 per cent more demand upsides. As a result, Seagate can respond faster to changing issues and demands, increasing the speed at which they do business.
This article was originally published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.