Mitsubishi Caterpillar Fork-
lift’s Journey Toward Total
Supply-Chain Integration
Managing Editor
Robert J. Bowman
A conversation with Saravana K. Sigamani, value stream manager with
Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America Inc.
Just as distributors need to calibrate their inventories
with actual customer demand, manufacturers of
equipment for running warehouses and distribution
centers must maintain tight links with buyers and suppliers, in order to ensure correct levels of parts and finished goods. Integrating processes across the supply
chain, especially for an industry in constant flux, is no
easy task. In this interview with SupplyChainBrain,
Saravana Sigamani talks about an ongoing initiative
at Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America which has
already spanned more than a decade, through which
the company is tackling such key issues as demand
and capacity planning, rapid replenishment and
sales and operations planning.
Q: Talk about some of the business challenges
that Mitsubishi Caterpillar Forklift America was facing, that started this initiative.
Sigamani: We are in the business of manufacturing and marketing forklifts for various segments. Our business challenges span over a
decade. Primarily, we started out with a push-based
model: we would make the trucks to stock, we
would find the customers, and then match the customers with that truck. That was one of our biggest
business challenges, back in 1999 and the early
2000s.
Then, as we rolled into the journey, we found
that our replenishment systems were not consistent. As we moved into the 2010s, we had infinite
capacity planning. Our capacity planning process
did not have a formal link between demand and
supply. These were the primary business challenges we faced over the span of 10 years.
Q: Did you learn this from your customer base, or
was it an internal realization? How did you come to
the point where you knew it was time for a change?
Sigamani: We’d had some symptoms that
drove these problems to the surface, as we found
more ways to efficiently make forklift trucks from a
profitability perspective, sustain the customer base
and increase our market share overall. This is a part-
nership with various suppliers as well. JDA is one of
them. At that point in time, we were a MAPICS
[Manufacturing, Accounting and Production Inven-
tory Control System]-driven MRP [Material Require-
ments Planning] plant system. JDA came into the
picture in 1999, when we were going to move from
MAPICS to BPCS [Business Planning and Control
System]. We implemented JDA’s Factory Planner
solution through our ERP [Enterprise Resource
Planning] system. So we partnered with them in the
early 2000s for solving this business challenge.
Q: What were some aspects of the solution that
you focused on in order to address these challenges?
Sigamani: The solutions were not in the
form of a magic silver bullet. We took a phased
approach over a period of decades, as the problems
were spanning out. First, we took a look at our systems to see how well they were integrated, from the
perspective of whether our model was supporting
our systems. The second part of the solution was
more internal—a Lean transformation inside the
company. We had the JDA folks come over and
help us. We wanted to get our ducks in a row first,
before we went to suppliers and said, ‘You have to
be more efficient.’ So we spun out a program called
Velocity. It’s a Lean deployment program that was
developed by our folks inside MCFA—a cross-functional program. We found some major burning-platform issues, one of which was the
replenishment process that I was talking about earlier.
Velocity helped us to integrate on that process,
all the way from the supplier to our warehouse, and
from the warehouse to the lines. We formalized the
replenishment processes by having a pull-based
system—kanban, JIT and min-max. We wanted to
go in the direction of three formal replenishment
triggers, from the 23 we had at one point in time. It
helped us a lot in identifying the seven types of
