Suppliers are important elements of strategic supply chain. Supplier risk management is supplier information management. That is why CB-iService facilitates collection of supplier profile information across multiple dimensions so as to manage supplier relationship effectively.
Similarly prices captured from different suppliers with different order quantity over different time-period helps managers to select the best option while deciding on a purchase order, thereby optimizing cost. System also provides time-series analysis of price of critical items using Auto-regressive Integrated Moving Average with Machine Learning. This provides crucial insight on the price movement of critical items used in bulk and minimizes the supply chain risk.
From user indent to disposal - the entire life cycle of fleet, its service history, demurrages/ damages/ delays, fueling, trips, drivers, all are tracked by the system. Transport orders, bills and collection are captured. Location service updates the route on the map.
One can track fleet earning and expenses over a period of time to ascertain the utilization of the asset.
Checklist based proactive service notifies the manager about impending service schedules or service delays so as to maintain the asset health efficiently.
Accidents, insurance and claims are managed on the system to obviate the need for multiple registers or phone calls during crisis period.
Purchase is an essential activity for any business. But this need not be unplaned or ad-hoc. Procurement planning starts with user indents and budgets. CB-iService allows users to do the budgeting for relevant expense category with necessary justification and approval workflow. Once approved, this budget is available for ordering so as to avoid any unplanned expenses. Users can issue indents which can go through approval workflow based on the organizational need. Material or Purchase department can consolidate the requirement of all approved user indents for relevant categories and issue a purchase requisition.
For large, high-value and complex procurement, RFP can be issued which links to the indent or requisitions for ensuring that user needs are met appropriately. Further, we can define limits for the purchase as well as payment. System will validate during ordering and payment stage the limits thereby ensuring the delegation of financial limits or authority as per the company policy.
Many suppliers deal with multiple product categories. We need not issue multiple purchase orders for that. In one PO, users can include all relevant categories, the SKU name, Quantity, Unit Of Measurement, Price and discounts. It saves user data entry time and supervisor's review time, if approval workflow is configured. At the same time, for SKU level visibility, this hierachical data is auto-converted to tabular display.
Once this order is configured, all material receipts are tracked against the order.
There may be part-shipment and system accepts it. The ordering currency for individual SKU may be different especially if that particular SKU is imported. No problem, CB-iService will convert it in to the base currency using the prevailing evaluation rate fed from reputed international agencies. If the rate conversion needs currency-specific custom charges (say 1-2%) for bank processing etc, that can be included. Hence you receive and pay what you ordered. Payment cannot be made without order. Order (Commitment) can be made ad-hoc without approved requisitions to handle emergency but payment has to be based on order and financial limits (if set).
How do we decide the best vendor for a specific item? Well it depends on the criteria we set for evaluation. This is why CB-iService allows users to set multiple weighted criteria using both supplier-level or organizational attributes such as reputation, past rating, financial stability, track record and item-level attribute such as material standards, performance values, operational features, component features, environmental characteristics etc.
Once evaluation criteria are set for optimal sourcing and supplier proposals are entered, for every supplier proposal, the evaluation template is ready. Users can quickly assign scores along with justification based on the individual judgement or collective judgement using approval workflow. System will rank the proposals based on the scores. With smart tools like this and timely data entries, a month-long evaluation phase can be reduced to an hour even after keeping an hour for structured evaluation of scores and justification given. This saves time, cost while minimizing risks for the organization.
Do you follow push manufacturing/trading or pull manufacturing/trading? It does not matter as long as you let CB-iService know about it. Accordingly it plans for JIT inventory or safety stock. It also captures maximum stock based on the usage and demand. If ordered quantity is more than maximum stock, it creates an exception.
However, this exception can be reasonable, if this is done to honour the minimum order quantity of the supplier, provided the supervisor approves it. System also sends alerts in case the stock level goes down below the threshold level. This threshold level can be manually or automatically set for each workplace (workplace can be a plant or storage unit etc) for each SKU based on user configuration.
When set to auto, the system defines the safety stock and maximum stock based on standard inventory formulae for the chosen type of inventory holding. During the creation of Sales Orders, system will check the availability of the stock at the given workplace. If there is a contract with a rate agreement for duration of certain time period, system automatically creates the replenishment order. However order will be auto-mailed to the supplier only after it is approved by the user with appropriate authority (if set). Inventory price can be visible over time with visibility of stock level at every work place.
Equipment and assets need checklist to ensure their operational readiness. CB-iService provides checklists to define the maintenance tasks at appropriate frequency.
System automatically populates these checklists at the set frequency, alerts users and send reminders if not done.
Shift management is an important aspect of operations in many organizations. With CB-iService, users can define the shift timing, add team members to the shift, add
their roles and track their attendance accordingly. Publishes roster automatically based on the data fed.
With CB-iService, users can identify the asset with barcode, allocate/transfer/return the asset based on organizational needs, maintain its service records, dispose
it, depreciate it and track its AMC (if present). Based on user settings, notifies the asset manager when AMC is expiring.
Products purchased must be quality-assured to compete in the market. CB-iService provides the facility to set quality criteria with weights and evaluate the purchased product against that. Item-specific threshold can be decided to generate exceptions or reject the item.
Safe and smooth productive operation and maintenance cannot happen without safety. CB-iService provides a tool to capture safety incidents, conduct causal analysis
so that corrective and preventive action can be taken promptly and track and report injuries & near-misses with trend analysis.
A progressive organization is a policy-guided one. CASHBox Pro facilitates the work of the management to maintain the list of applicable policy and manual for each department, its sharing, digital acknowledgement by user and online testing of user awareness, as desired.
