Analyzing Supply Chain Performance
Tenex uses Speedware’s Business Intelligence (BI) solutions to improve their supply chain performance.
"Speedware’s solutions enabled our organization to use the information available as a strategic weapon and improve our bottom line performance."
Robert A. Andreini
Chief Information Officer, Tenex
Also available in pdf format 
Tenex, a global plastics manufacturer specializing in home and office products, depends on its ability to deliver products on time to their customers. Measuring Tenex’s supply chain performance is critical to meeting its business objectives of improving customer delivery schedules and increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Tenex knows that staying competitive in a global marketplace is a matter of making critical decisions that would improve delivery of products around the world. Tenex prides itself on its ability to ensure customer satisfaction, so when a major customer complained about consistently late and incomplete shipments, management began to investigate.
The customer claimed that only 30% of its orders arrived complete and on time, and began penalizing Tenex. Tenex records showed that approximately 99% of the customer’s orders went out the door as scheduled, but the customer didn’t want to delve into a minute comparison of shipping records. As far as the customer was concerned, Tenex was simply not able to deliver complete orders on time.
The customer agreed to give Tenex access to their extranet reporting system, but could not provide any additional assistance. The Tenex IT staff immediately went to work. For Tenex, lack of information wasn’t a problem—their data warehouse was fully stocked. On the other hand, making sense of the data was a puzzler. Tenex managers needed to access, query and analyze large volumes of numerical data, and they needed the right software tools to help them.
Tenex extracted delivery receipt data from the customer’s shipping reports and loaded it into a database on their HP e3000 system. They matched the data to their own shipping information and then loaded the results into Media, Speedware’s OLAP solution, where they began a comparison analysis.
It didn’t take long for the discrepancies to become apparent. Tenex was hitting a 99.7% success rate for the number of complete shipments that left the production facility on time. But the customer was also correct -- certain shipments did arrive late, with some goods missing or damaged.
Media’s comparison analysis let Tenex zero in on one of the customer’s preferred carriers. They could see that this carrier sometimes missed pickup appointments and held up shipments in its terminals, either because of manpower shortages or to consolidate shipments for more efficient transport—efficient for the carrier, perhaps, but not for Tenex’s customers.
Tenex discovered that the extra time in the carrier’s warehouse accounted for the late, missing and separated shipments.
Tenex gave their customer a detailed explanation of the shipping problem, along with a solution to improve delivery. The customer was so impressed with Tenex’s ability to analyze the situation, discover the problem and take immediate action that they supported Tenex until the problem was resolved. As a result of their efficiency in fixing the delivery problem, the customer increased its business with Tenex.
With Media’s help, Tenex is on the way to becoming one of the customer’s favorite vendors!
Like most large companies, Tenex is faced with a myriad of technical issues that impact day-today profitability. Media gave Tenex the power to analyze their supply chain in depth, discover a delivery problem and take action. As a result, Tenex increased both its customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Tenex is a worldwide organization that develops, manufactures and markets innovative plastic products for the home and office. Their best seller is a plastic chair mat that lets office chairs glide easily over carpeted floors. Tenex’s assets include a state-of-the-art compounding center, a high-output extrusion facility and a fully computerized injection-molding outfit.
Also available in pdf format
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