In the valve manufacturing business product lifecycles have shortened & time-to-market at optimized production costs has become critical to manufacturers. In response, outsourcing to contract manufacturers in best-cost countries is on the rise. Global sourcing has tremendous potential for enhancing the efficiency of and introducing flexibility into the production process. However, maintaining requisite quality levels & keeping control over the complete sourcing process with globally dispersed manufacturing partners is a challenge.

Coordinating schedules of multiple sourcing partners is difficult given constraints of communication, limited control & different time zones. Product quality could also suffer if production stages are not monitored for the necessary quality parameters. The targeted objectives of global sourcing such as cost optimization, compressed development cycles & simplified vendor management might not be completely achieved.

SGSS helps define various phases as per your processes and their respective workflows & rules. You get the ability to track the status of a line item and its associated quality certification. Auto-alerts on status updates help bridge time-zone differences. A secure & integrated platform for simplified exchange of product drawings & related information ensures that you can safely and unambiguously exchange all technical & business information. SGSS allows automated reminders that notify the concerned party about product delivery milestones & associated formalities such as certifications, delivery and quality reports.

It frees you up to focus on process monitoring & management and other objectives such as process improvement. You can track vendor / partner performance by tracking delivery & quality metric achievements by individual partners. The benefit to partners are several - enhancement of overall capabilities, improved profitability & sustained customer relationships. The improved transparency results in better anticipation of delivery & quality problems. Higher costs resulting from unforeseen or unplanned shipments can be reduced. Simplified processing & tracking of purchase orders lead to considerable time savings and enables smaller contract sizes resulting in lower inventory costs.