At its core, supply chain is a set of optimization puzzles that I have come to love and appreciate. The more that I spend time in the industry the more I have come to realize that there are some principles that can be commonly applied.
One, there is strength in a set of strong foundational people, tools and processes. Building a strong foundation takes many people, tools and processes, and I find that it is a huge undertaking that is appreciated by few and achieved by even fewer. However, one of the reasons I joined Micron was their dedication to investing in their supply chain to build and implement that strong foundation. With that strong foundation, we are able to expand and realize the benefits of that investment. Last year, we expanded our planning platform to rearchitect our order-promising systems and release NGOP (next-generation order processing). This past week I was in a discussion where we designed an order allocation change in our process that will reduce sales order reaction time in the piloted segment by an estimated 50% and is a perfect complement for our MBT initiatives to create business value through system automation and smoother coordination across the business. It enables us to further configure customer allocation logic within our automation with business requirements and priorities as a default and further pushes the envelope between people and machines to make our lives better and more scalable. It is currently a pilot in one business unit with hopes to expand across other business segments with applications that I clearly see across Sales and all the BUs.
Two, end-to-end optimization provides benefits over localized optimizations. And, as you apply this principle as we go forward, the leading companies will extend their optimization beyond what we traditionally define as end-to-end, that is, stopping at a single company’s four walls. The more advanced companies would need to look at optimization across their extended supply chains and make more opportunities for the shared benefits of optimization through the entire chain. Just last week I was super excited to be in a meeting with supply chain, our storage business unit (SBU) and sales leadership, preparing for a customer engagement that opens the door for this very type of engagement where we will propose and explore the possibilities. The chance to partner to further optimize more of the true supply chain, to deepen the relationship, leverage common resources, expand our business and reap the added benefits of advancing optimization in inventory, increasing responsiveness and sharing the benefits of reduced costs to encourage our business benefits and our end-user customer experience.
What a start to an exciting year ahead! I can’t wait to see what other opportunities we will have to spread these tools across the business and into SBU and the outcome of our proposed engagement with the customer and how far we deepen the relationship and drive towards a larger more impactful optimization and relationship.
