The Applicator

I used to work at QAD, a small manufacturing software vendor. I subscribe to a QAD chat group, and occasionally people ask questions like the one in the title.

It sounds as if the person asking is peddling something–who knows–but it’s an interesting question nonetheless. What kinds of knowledge are necessary (key) for an ERP implementation? If you run a manufacturing company, is APICS (that is, supply chain) knowledge particularly important?

Certainly, QAD used to think so. When I was an employee, you got a bonus for becoming APICS certified. (APICS is the American Production and Inventory Control Society; to get certified, you had to learn how MRP worked and how inventory should be managed.) And certainly, when the product was designed, the focus was on matching supply and demand. The product was built originally for Karl Lopker’s sandal manufacturing business, and the idea was always to have simple, usable product that managed inventory well.

So you would think that the answer, at least for QAD users, is, “Of course APICS knowledge is key. Duh.” But I don’t think so.

You see, while I was at QAD and then for some years afterward, I looked at a fair number of installations. And what I saw was disheartening, at least if you believed in good supply chain practices. The systems weren’t really using good supply chain practices, at least as APICS defined them.

Let me give you an example, which APICS-trained people will understand immediately. One of the ideas of these systems is to reduce the amount of inventory you have on hand at any one time. To do this inside the system, there are two parameters that you have to set, lead time (which is the amount of time it takes for an order to be fulfilled) and safety stock (the amount you want to have on hand at all times). The longer the lead time or the higher the amount of the safety stock, the greater your inventory expense.

So what would you say if discovered that in not one or even two installations, but many, the safety stock and lead time numbers for most of the inventory were set once, en masse, and then never set again? Well, I’ll tell you what to think. These figures, which are key to making the system work, are not being used.

Now this was not just true of QAD Software; it was equally true wherever I went, no matter what software was installed.

So doesn’t this say that supply chain knowledge is key, after all? If they had supply chain knowledge, wouldn’t they have paid more attention? At first, I thought so. But then after a while, I realized that more supply chain knowledge would have made very little difference.

You see, that’s not why they were using the software. All these companies, it turns out, didn’t really care about getting supply chain stuff right. They managed the supply chain fairly sloppily–tolerated a lot of inaccuracy and suboptimal behavior–and they got along (in their minds) just fine doing that. They didn’t want to put in the kind of care and rigor that is the sine qua non for doing with these systems what they were designed to do.

What were they using the software for? Well, mostly to manage the paperwork virtually. Please don’t cringe, Pam, if you happen to be reading this. This is not a hack on you. The plain fact is that the companies needed to keep track of their commitments (orders), their inventory, and their money, and that’s what they used the system for. They needed a piece of paper that told people what inventory to move that day and where to move it to. And the system gave it to them.

To do this, though, you didn’t need much APICS knowledge or, if you didn’t believe in APICS’s recipes for inventory management, other supply chain knowledge. All you really needed was to be able to count, which most of the users could do without being APICS-certified.

So is supply chain knowledge key for an ERP implementation? Not at all. You can have perfectly happy users who have got exactly the nice simple implementation they need without much supply chain knowledge at all.

This answer, of course, raises lots of questions. What is key? Why do these companies tolerate sloppy supply chain practices? Wouldn’t they be better off if they cleaned up their act. Herewith, brief answers.

What is key? At a rudimentary level, the financials. You have to get the basics right, here, or you’ll never close your books. In a system studied recently by a grad student at Harvard Business School, 65% of the inventory records were inaccurate. Can you imagine the upset if 65% of your account balances were incorrect?

Why do they tolerate sloppy supply chain practices? I think it’s largely because more finely tuned systems are much more brittle. They take a large amount of care and feeding and their ability to take hard, rude, unexpected shocks is limited.

And wouldn’t they do much better using the systems? In many cases, no. You see, at most of the companies I’ve run into, the MRP/APICS model that QAD (and every other software vendor) provided is not actually all that accurate. To make a really significant difference, you need more sophisticated tools that are better suited to the specifics of your supply chain.

Comments welcome.