Re-imagining Physical Inventory Process Leveraging Digital Technologies for Leading Japanese Automaker

Client

The customer is the North America subsidiary of a global manufacturing conglomerate of world-class automobiles, motorcycles, and power equipment.

Our Experience

Physical Inventory is an annual accounting process to manually count and report inventory spread across warehouses, in-transit, manufacturing plants, etc. An external auditor needs to verify the accuracy of count and approve the inventory. This process in plant floor consumes most effort, as many varied parts are spread across large areas and semi-built vehicles.

Challenges

This activity is manual labor-intensive and a paper-based process, which is disruptive, costintensive and prone to discrepancies and rework/recounting. It consumes 4,000+ hours of effort in a large plant to conduct physical inventory.

LTM Solution

• Custom mobile app compatible with iOS and Android OS was developed to scan barcode (ABBYY OCR plug-in) and capture part count and part number from paper tags. 
• Real-time validation of part number with master data stored in cloud.
• Real-time status reporting on dashboard based on Java/Angular technology and faster completion of accounting reconciliation process.

Business Benefits

• 25% savings in overall efforts due to elimination of non-value adding activities like wait time, scanning and managing paper tags. 
• 90% reduction in errors due to single point of data entry and near real time availability of count data.