The coronavirus crisis has accentuated the need to control resources, and in particular equipment and load carriers without which transport cannot be carried out. A motorcycle cannot be delivered without bases, a piece of glass without trestles.

In an economy where international exchanges in real time are more and more numerous, and where the search for productivity is becoming a crucial issue, the logistics sector is continuing its digital transformation. Agility and reactivity have become essential to deal with a constantly expanding number of flows.

Jean-Marc Soulier, director of the Supply Chain practice at Wavestone, digitalization will allow”to increase the speed and agility of businesses, to better control its supplier network (ranks 1, 2 and 3), to know in near real time the status of its stocks and its capacities, and to be able to plan and reschedule at high speed”.

One of the main problems to be solved is to have enough assets available on loading sites to be able to fulfill future orders, while maintaining a reasonable margin of safety on the size of the fleet.

So what consequences can a poorly completed inventory have on your logistical performance? Here are our top 3.

The size of the fleet is not adjusted

Supply chain actors regularly invest in equipment locally, by agency or by country, as well as in different types of equipment depending on the needs of the operation.

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In cases where the activity concerns just-in-time flows such as the automobile for example, reactivity in relation to an order is essential. This relocation of resource management as well as the customer emergency are pushing manufacturers to increase the size of their fleet, for safety and to respond to seasonality. It can be expensive.

Today, real-time inventories are generally based on the declarative data of operational staff in the field who manually complete the TMS and WMS of the internal systems. Each country or BU often has a different software. An annual physical inventory can also be organized at the enterprise-wide level.

As explained in this interview Lucie Vauché, innovation project manager at FM Logistic:

‍“On an operational level, [...] These are quite cumbersome processes. And when we have to carry out a fiscal inventory, that is to say the annual inventory, checked by customer auditors, we are under pressure. The entire warehouse must be inventoried in a limited time, often on weekends. That's all the more resources to plan for this period.”

One of the solutions to avoid these asset shortages is to have real-time visibility on the number of assets at each loading site by asset type.

The use of apparatus is diverted

Warehouses must store a certain volume of goods in order to then be transported to their final destination. However, many companies do not have enough storage space, and therefore divert the use of certain equipment into storage, inside and outside the factory.

This use of the equipment park is likely to cause shortages of availability because it is diverted from their initial purpose. This can also be the case on the customer's delivery site, who has not finished unloading his stock, takes advantage of this available equipment to keep his goods.

Thus, when the investment budget made at the beginning of the year did not take into account these diversion effects, a lack of equipment can impact the entire network.

‍Imbalances appear in the distribution of materials between agencies.

While the availability of equipment conditions the proper functioning of logistics, inventory imbalances appear quite quickly between factories, on flows that are mostly long-distance or international.

To optimize the size of the fleet, companies often use a logic of pooling resources in the network. Without granular and real-time management of the distribution of these materials or min/max rules on the number of devices to be used at a given time (number likely to change depending on the transport plan and variations in customer orders), differences can widen between different countries or agencies.

Take the example of Saint Gobain Glass: each of the 18 factories must have a minimum of easels of each type ready to be used at all times: in fact, no easel, no delivery.

In conclusion, taking the digital turn to finely manage asset availability and be more proactive in the use of your equipment facilitates inter-agency pooling and guarantees the customer promise of OTIF deliveries.

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Want to learn a bit more? Plan a meeting with our team.