• Nessuna parola chiave trovata

It has been known, for many years, that every company is now acting in an ever more competitive environment, in which there are several tough competitors, simultaneously. The ever growing attention toward the so called “integrated logistics” comes from the awareness that nowadays supply chains compete, not just companies. Supply chain management, then, gets a key role for company success, as well as research and development, product engineering, quality, finance, ecc….
By citing a Peter Metzs definition, we can say:
“Integrated Supply Chain Management is a process oriented, integrated approach to procuring, producing and delivery products or service to customers. It has a broad scope that includes sub-suppliers, suppliers, internal operations, trade customers, retail customers and end users. It covers the management of materials, information and funds flow”.
It talks no longer just about those subjects that act within the company, but also about those which interact due to reach a final customer with a product or a service.
According with that, as the global chain strength is determined by the weakest link, we have to emphasize each element, from suppliers (and sub – suppliers as well) to final customers. Everybody in fact has a really influence on creating company value.
In our specific situation, the internship period spent at GETS-GS-EMEA sourcing unit in Florence, made me able to face deeply the sourcing management issue, which is obviously tied to the production and to the delivery management. The purpouse of my work consisted essentially in optimizing purchasing process. Which has been possible just by doing a deep process analysis and reviewing, in order to eliminate non compliance, minimize time waste and make work flow smoother.
The first part of the period has been spent in order to well understand both the whole company and the sourcing processes. At the same time, we have been taught to use the purchasing application system of company ERP, and have been introduced to the “Lean 6 Sigma” concepts, which, being company culture pillars, have been used as work approach.
During the second part we have been working on the core of our activity. We have analyzed the sourcing process (defining its owners, goals, customers, links to others processes and metrics) in order to characterize and measure all those wastes and problems which could cause performance lowering. After having done this, we defined some improving actions focused on goals. In order to do that, as some issues were not always an only sourcing unit responsibility, we have been interacting with the different company functions involved in. All actions have been compared (on implementation ease and predictable improvement basis) and ranked. Those action which seemed to be easiest to be implemented (as our time was not much) has been implemented.
Finally we have tried to evaluate the level we achieved our goals and objectives by measuring results and possible further improvement margins achievable by implementing the remaining actions as well.
Thus, our work framework will be the following: first of all, we will give a short presentation of the company, followed by a brief explanation of main processes and a detailed description of sourcing process. Then we will show every step of the DMAIC approach which represents our work core. Finally we will draw some conclusions and we will talk about further improvement possibilities.