agement is one. In assessing the performance level of your carrier
base, the system will push selection toward the high-performing
carriers. Dock scheduling—driving some carriers to certain parts of
the day—is another area for use, Hirshman says.
From an execution standpoint, sometimes it is difficult to come
up with real transit times between points. Hirshman says the
embedded-analytics process gives up-to-the-minute information on
these, allowing you to validate your load plans.
“The benefit here is that the system takes the analyst out of the
process. With traditional KPIs, somebody has to actually extract the
information, interpret it, then decide how to go ahead and put it into
play. So there’s an element of subjectivity there. That’s yesterday’s news
by the time you do that. This automatic process takes that out of it.”
How to Harness the Power of Your
MRO Supply Chain
How important are maintenance, repair and operational
items in the energy industry? Well, they are what keep a
plant functioning on a daily basis, says Mark Johnson, vice
president for energy and chemical industries at Exel. In
fact, the MRO supply chain is critical for companies in
those sectors today.
That’s why with all the pressure on supply chain executives to
keep costs under control that there is so much attention and
focus on the MRO end of things. “The focus today is to become
efficient,” Johnson says, “and whereas in the past the gaze of
these executives was not on MRO, that’s changing. Economies
are globalizing, supply chains are globalizing, and these indirect
or MRO supply chains are extending and becoming global. We
see this in these particular industries, where oil and gas used to
be in locations that were fairly easy to reach. But now they often
are in areas that are hard to reach. So the cost of supply has a
focus and intensity that has just increased over the years.”
In many ways the challenges facing the MRO executive are the
same as always; and so are the responses. Materials management is
run by a maintenance organization, usually in collaboration with
the procurement department. And as always, both of these organi-
zations have very intense agendas. “Imagine if you’re the party
responsible for maintenance, the last thing you want to do is jeop-
ardize the supply of some material. It could be relatively inexpen-
sive, but you don’t want to jeopardize a task because you don’t
have that supply. If you don’t have a lot of confidence in that supply
chain, you tend to acquire things either in an expedited fashion at
the last minute or in a fashion where you have confidence that you
can access that supply. So we often find what we call ‘squirrel piles,’
where that maintenance person is making sure his supply is not
interrupted. That’s not exactly the healthiest supply chain.”
The MRO executive wants to increase the reliability and per-
formance of the supply chain, but what does a successful MRO sup-
ply chin look like? The answer varies depending on the industry.
But there are some parallels. In the oil and gas sectors, the MRO
