Gabriel Zahr, Chief of Logistics and Operations at Salfa, arrived with the mission to instill order in his area. When in need of improving his inventory’s data reliability, he took his chances with OSA Andes. This is his story.
“When I was hired in Salfa, maybe around 2018?, too few processes were already established”, tells us Gabriel Zahr, Chief of Logistics and Operations at SALFA.
A lot of latin-american companies have grown to become main market players in their area, while still lacking proper process definition, leaving themselves riddled with the operational knots and vices of an informal logistic discipline.
Here’s where the work of professionals like Gabriel tends to shine. They arrive to shape their areas, defining every process boundaries, assigning concrete functions to each team member, allowing to build better market analysis mechanisms.
One of the main issues that surfaced were the mismatching problems between the ERP’s systemic unit position and the unit’s actual physical position, an inevitable disarray born out of the contrast between accounting’s needs to bill from every store and the logistical impossibilities to catch up with every unit’s movement from one place to another.
“First things first, we needed to audit the current stock we had in the system. Then we could measure the mismatch and get to understand what’s really going on. So I was around 8 or 9 months in, here at SALFA, and we started auditing stock inventory monthly, but we did it by hand so it was painfully slow.
Try to imagine, I had to spend one or two days assembling the document and coordinating everyone for the stock count to be done. Warehouse and store workers took the whole day, sometimes two, all done by hand. I'm talking pen and paper here. After that, every worker had to type the data into a specific Microsoft Excel sheet format, then send it to me, and -THEN- I had to consolidate every database into one, so I could compare it against the system’s stock”, Gabriel recalls.
This process, besides consuming a lot of precious time, sprouted many errors due to re-typing related mistakes. Finally, by matching missing units with misplaced units in warehouses and stores, the stock overall reliability was found to be just 70%.
Around this time, OSA was already in service supply negotiations with SALFA, so Gabriel found out we had an Inventory Audit feature for OSA Andes.
“Well, let’s try it. Something could come up out of this”, he said faithlessly back then.
But the experience took him by surprise from the very beginning, with a user-friendly Roll Out, a ludic worker training and a swift adaptation process, we worked together to make the OSA toolset fulfill the needs of SALFA’s operation.
“Now that I have all the data online, I can broadcast to my team every vehicle at risk of showing up as ‘lost’ during the inventory audit. This urges all involved to respond quickly, because no one wants to make the list.
This helps us not to have any more mavericks, like this truck we had some time ago, which got lost for a long time in a fixtures and fittings workshop. The App allows us to raise all our suspicions early enough to track all misplaced units and identify their physical position.”, he tells us.
Nowadays, with a one-and-a-half years of work perspective, with a more mature process, and without any irregular cases; problems for the logistics area can be solved with haste and ease. A very valuable situation as a result of a seamlessly executed digital audit with real-time reports.
“The audit process with OSA Andes is very fast! I thought it would be hard to incorporate, but it quickly became an integral part of our operation. I can no longer imagine myself working without OSA Andes. It helps workers widely reduce the margin of error, it’s friendly and easy to use. I never thought we could go over 85% of inventory reliability and we have already reached 95%”, Gabriel adds, satisfied.
As for OSA, we are delighted at every chance we get to narrow the gaps between ERP’s accounting oriented unit data and the real physical unit data. Besides, we're already releasing powerful analisis tools based on the Inventory Audit module.
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