Cupertino, CA -- (SBWIRE) -- 10/24/2013 -- Narayan Laksham, founder and CEO of Ultriva, Inc. recently discussed the importance of supply chain embracing lean practices in manufacturing. In a blog posted on the company’s website, Laksham explained, “Lean in its purest form is removal of waste. In today’s world, manufacturing is becoming more competitive than ever with shorter lead times, higher service levels, exploding number of finished goods SKUs, and thinning margins. Over the last twenty years, the focus of lean in manufacturing was concentrated on streamlining the factory floor, aligning of production lines, optimization of space, and standardizing of operating procedures.”

Ultriva focuses on leaning the supply chain. One of the fastest and most important factors to apply lean manufacturing principles to the material replenishment process is establishing a pull system. The underlying methodology for implementing a pull system is referred to as kanban, and historically kanban has always been used as a manual card-based system. Paper-based kanban was new and revolutionary 30 years ago; it worked well when manufacturing was vertically integrated and suppliers were located within a short radius.

The current global, 24/7 fast-paced environment where manufacturing is far less integrated and suppliers are located on nearly every continent renders the manual kanban card system obsolete. Demonstrating agility and responsiveness to this new manufacturing alacrity was part of facing the changing realities of the supply chain. Ultriva pioneered the electronic kanban which turns the manual card system into a powerful closed-loop kanban through supplier collaboration and the real-time flow of order, shipment and receipt information. Ultriva maintains the visual nature of Kanban while guaranteeing “no lost cards” or “no duplicate cards.” The electronic Kanban is workflow-controlled to keep track of who did what, when and where. This allows several metrics to be automatically computed.

To read the entire blog, go to: http://web.ultriva.com/ultriva-blog/bid/97535/Why-Supply-Chain-Needs-to-Embrace-Lean-Manufacturing-Principles.

About Ultriva
Ultriva (http://www.ultriva.com) empowers leading industrial, automotive, healthcare, aerospace, and defense businesses to operate more effectively and collaboratively by providing real time visibility and targeted actionable intelligence into inventory and material flows. Ultriva’s cloud-based platform leverages and seamlessly integrates with leading ERP and MRP systems, to deliver an end to end pull based replenishment model for a wide variety of industry sectors and enterprises such as ATK, CareFusion, Emerson, Ingersoll Rand, McKesson, Magellan, Regal Beloit, Thermo Fisher and more. Few Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software solutions meet the requirements of Oracle users who turn to Ultriva’s Supply Chain Cloud solution, an Oracle Validated Integration solution. Ultriva is a privately held, growing software company based in Cupertino, California. Follow Ultriva on Twitter at @Ultriva.

Ultriva, Inc.
http://www.ultriva.com
Cynthia Leonard
Marketing Executive
cynthial@ultriva.com
408.961.2495