Medical devices leader to implement inventory analysis tool to optimize inventory, service levels
Boston — November 18, 2005 — Tyco Healthcare Group, a leading manufacturer and distributor of medical devices, said this week it has selected ToolsGroup's inventory optimization solution to achieve inventory and customer service improvements in North America.
To meet the Healthcare Group's goals of lower inventory with industry-leading fill rates, we needed to take our network inventory modeling granularity to the next level in order to consider the supply chain tradeoffs and ultimate placement of inventory, said Peter Sturtevant, vice president of Supply Chain Solutions and Transportation. We selected ToolsGroup to add to our arsenal of tools because we could rapidly model and satisfy our requirements with an off-the-shelf solution.
The Tyco Healthcare implementation will use DPM, ToolsGroup's multi-echelon inventory optimization solution, to conduct strategic inventory and service level optimization. With DPM, executives are expected to be able to plan their customer service policies at very high fill rates and then optimize the global inventory mix and allocation across the supply chain to meet them.
In addition, the same ToolsGroup software can be used for both strategic studies and for operations, thereby ensuring that Tyco Healthcare executives will see the same results in practice as they did in their plans.
The project represents a jointly delivered solution from ToolsGroup and its strategic alliance partner Chainalytics, LLC, a provider of supply chain optimization services.
Tyco Healthcare, like other distribution-intensive companies we've worked with, requires a multi-echelon inventory optimization approach to tackle the challenges of lowering overall inventory, better managing demand and improving service, said Joseph Shamir, CEO of ToolsGroup. DPM provides those planning tools and the tactical control to convert that strategy into action across the whole supply chain to achieve significant and sustainable cost savings.
For more information on managing inventory liability, see the article "Bridging the Reality Gap" in the August/September 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.
