help motivate their sales team.
The company also started to localize order fulfillment. Looking back, one strategic the Company
questions is “localizing to localize” without ques tioning whether it was the best fit for sourcing.
However, localized sourcing shortened lead times and improve responsiveness.
Bringing It All Together: The Connected Supply Chain
In 2015, the company began focusing on total cost of ownership, order cycle time, and Sales and
Operations planning (S&OP).
The company needed to ensure they were balancing everything appropriately, not only considering
just purchase price variance or cost down but all the elements of the source-plan-make-deliver cycle.
(In the case of Rockwell Au tomation, it’s plan -source-make-deliver because of the structure of the
organization.) Ultimately, the company made sure they were taking into consideration all the various
elements and the impact they will have on different functions of the process supply chain.
Total order cycle time was about going back to the cash and thinking about ways to reduce the time.
This methodology was especially crucial for Rockwell Automation global customers, whose impact
was notable sinc e it didn’t have th e benefit of their distribution network. The company focused on
sales and operations planning comprising one supply chain. They also focused on lowering the walls
of the silos: getting logistics, sourcing, supply chain planning to work on being globally inclusive. The
company embraced cross-functional thinking, became much more end-to-end, and leveraged its
cross-functional talent. All of these steps led to the final push: the introduction of the connected
supply chain.
The next step was modernization. At this point Rockwell Automation was ready to redesign supply
chain hordes, to fundamentally change its business process, and to leverage technology.
The Result: Show Me the Money
The journey started with realistic expectations: a sustainable return, a reduction in cost, and improved
supplier performance. As Rockwell Automation learned and understood their capacity and segmented
their data, they saw significant improvement in on-time fulfillment rates, product lead time drops by
50%, and past due orders (ten-fold improvement). In Figure 14, we share the results from the journey.
Figure 14 . Quantifiable Results of Rockwell’s Automation Journey
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