Global Product & Inventory Management
Harmonizing Warehouses & Production On 5 Continents
RFS is a worldwide leading provider of innovative wireless and broadcast infrastructure products and solutions. Over the years the company acquired several manufacturers and now runs 8 plants and 5 R&D centers on 5 continents with specialized equipment which allows for customized products.
This results in a large range of cable types and product specifications (internally called quality codes) which are stored and maintained in local software with silo-ed data models. This complexity puts strong strains on the entire supply chain from procurement and production to global inventory management and sales. www.rfsworld.com
250 % ROIWithin 1 Year
20 MONTHSOf Internal Processes Saved
12 %Reduced Working Capital
PRODUCT USED
eccenca Corporate Memory
Our vision is a digital, agile supply chain that connects suppliers and customers through manufacturing by means of seamless data integration and e2e digitization of operations. With support of our semantic technology partner eccenca we gained an overarching understanding of our data enabling us to drive Industry 4.0 and Smart Supply Chain objectives effectively. To be frank, we never before had such a level of data transparency.
Karl Kirschenhofer
COO, RFS (2017-2020)
Challenge: Integrating Global Acquisitions
Harmonize Quality Codes
Every plant used individual quality codes for their products. This prevented comparability and cross-selling of products between different plants and warehouses.
Optimize Inventory Stock
Very volatile production conditions lead to reject products that don't fit the original order's specs but are fully functional and usable in other projects. Due to the lack of comparability between different inventory management systems this results in large (dead) stock.
Enable Dynamic Sales
Customers requests are generally turned into production orders even though fitting stock might be available in a warehouse abroad. This lack of global search capabilities of inventory management systems results in long lead-times.
Solution: Globally Link Product & Stock Data
With eccenca Corporate Memory, quality codes from RFS plants were lifted and globally harmonized on metadata level using a common data schema. The raw data stayed in their respective local inventory management system.
In a first step existing data models and raw data were analyzed, and a unified vocabulary for the disparate data was developed.
The raw data was sync-ed with an RDF triple store and enriched with metadata to enable the global exploration of data via a global Quality-Code-Plugin. To reduce efforts for transaction processes an automation and scheduling process was introduced. Harmonized interactive html-datasheets were implemented to enable global search processes across all warehouse stocks and local inventory management systems including the products' highly diverse specifications.
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We’ve enabled data agility by creating a semantic data architecture embedded in our enterprise IT architecture. We are now able to give the customer a fully digital experience in certain processes, are reducing approx. 20 man-months of transactional effort in internal processes, and are in discussion with suppliers and customers to collaborate with exchanging data thus moving away from EDI and supply portals.
Karl Kirschenhofer
CEO
