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When an enterprise has many suppliers, dealers/distributors, and customers spread out across the globe, it becomes important that it gains better visibility into inventory outside of its direct ownership and control, on both the supply and demand side. On the supply side, the company has outstanding POs and needs reliable estimates of when those will ship, as well as early indications whenever there will be delays in shipment. Once shipped, updates on the estimated time of arrival (ETA) are important, particularly when there are delays.

This external visibility is even more important during times of disruption. Early visibility into disruptions in supply or rapid changes in demand is key to providing the intelligence to drive agility. By responding earlier, faster, and with more accurate intelligence, a company has more options, makes smarter decisions, and avoids catastrophes.

How do you get that visibility? Here are some options…

OTTO  A Q&A with an MIS Manager from a metal fabrication manufacturer:

1. How difficult was it to initially install OTTO?

"We loaded OTTO on our AS/400 on a Friday morning and demonstrated OTTO's capabilities with our own data that afternoon. That really impressed me from an IS perspective because it was so easy to load and run."

2. Would you install it on a test system or on the production system?

"We installed on the production system in order to use live data. OTTO resides outside of the ERP system and builds its own databases so it is not detrimental to any other system."

3. How difficult was it to implement OTTO, was there a negative impact on daily operations?

"Some reports were being used on the first day of the evaluation. There was only positive impact on our operation. For example, shortages in our final assembly area were eliminated within 30 days of the demonstration."

4. Comments?

"I was greatly surprised OTTO fit so well with our operation. OTTO has worked well in our company (we substantially increased on time shipments at the same time our business was seeing a 3 fold increase), but each company has to judge for themselves how well OTTO fits in with their organization."

Contact us to learn how OTTO can help your company!

Your business doesn’t run without the right people and processes in place, but in order for people to manage the right things at the right time, they need tools... the RIGHT tools. 

OTTO helps manufacturing plants consistently meet customer commitments, allowing supervisors and managers to spend more time analyzing, making decisions, communicating, and coordinating. We can prove that OTTO is the right tool for the job.

Give it a test drive for 30 days at no charge and see immediate results.

Contact George Moroses today to learn more.

Most manufacturers are being pressured to reduce delivery lead-times and rely on their planning systems to meet their commitments. This works very well if everything happens as planned. But planning by itself doesn’t make things happen, people and processes make things happen. This acceleration is putting tremendous pressure on key users like planners, schedulers, buyers and production supervisors. Not only are they struggling to meet daily commitments and relying on “brute force” solutions to get the job done but they can actually become unrecognized production constraints. Planning is more important than ever but is no longer sufficient to meet current challenges because the real challenge in meeting commitments isn't planning but in making plans happen.

This is where OTTO comes in - Learn More>

1.  How difficult is it to initially install OTTO?

Dead easy is the straight answer. We relied on you to install, and you installed in the predicted 1 hour.  

2.  Would you install it on a test system or on the production system?

Production system is another easy answer. I use OTTO as the ideal prototype when talking to business contacts about “add-on” products. It is non-invasive; it only reads data from our ERP files. I know the implementation is 100% safe because no ERP files are ever updated (read corrupted) by OTTO.

3.  How difficult was it to implement OTTO? Was there a negative impact on daily operations?

There is a learning curve involved in using any new tool that has value to add. OTTO implementation is very low on the impact scale, but I would strongly recommend that a prospective client plan on investing in education and practice. OTTO implementation is low impact. No valuable tool is “no impact”.

Click here to learn more about OTTO