Electronic Kanban said to improve efficiency of material movement; reduce inventories, eliminate shortages
Long Beach, CA — May 24, 2005 — Glovia International, a provider of extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for engineer-to-order and high volume manufacturers, announced today the availability of glovia.com Electronic Kanban, a module that provides automatic demand-driven replenishment of materials and inventory.
Glovia said its Electronic Kanban expands on the essence of Kanban, the premise of having material only delivered to a location when it is needed so that no excess inventory is created. The new module can be executed as a part of the supply chain as it provides the ability to monitor consigned and line side inventory levels, and establish triggers to automatically replenish inventory when a predefined minimum for each inventory level has been reached.
With Electronic Kanban, the triggering of the Kanban pull is done automatically for the predefined quantity of material from the stores location to the predefined location on the factory floor. Glovia said this enables the user to focus on the physical material movement while the system manages the data movement.
The process can also be expanded to include open communication with a manufacturer's customers and suppliers. glovia.com Electronic Kanban establishes the same auto-triggers for additional material from suppliers as it would internally with the system managing the data manipulation by triggering the proper initiator to the supplier. This can also be done for maintaining supplies at a customer site for which glovia.com maintains the quantity and triggers a Sales Order Deliver Line when the predefined minimum is reached.
"As growing amounts of work become redistributed to suppliers and trading partners it has become increasingly important to expand Kanban beyond the internal manufacturing technique used to improve the efficiency of material movement," stated Randy Ehler, executive vice president, Research & Development and Products, for Glovia International.