Vecna Robotics provides AI-powered robotics for the material handling industry. To build their product, their small but mighty manufacturing and purchasing team sources a wide range of mechanical and electrical parts from a diverse supply base across the world. They came to Factor to help get accurate ETAs from suppliers and manage variable lead times.
The problem
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Vecna’s supplier lead times have become more variable, with delays from suppliers risking build timelines and customer satisfaction.
Their team has a variety of responsibilities, and proactively following up with suppliers on every line item of every PO to keep ETAs up-to-date was unrealistic. And when the team did reach out to some vendors, those that responded were slow to do so, and gave vague, unactionable updates like, “The new ETA for this order is Q4.” And to add to the problem, their MRP process used quoted lead times rather than real lead times, resulting in inaccurate forecasts that further complicated the problem.
How Vecna uses Factor
- Tracks ETAs on an average of 150-200 direct materials line items per month
- Enables vendors to provide updates via the vendor’s preferred method.
- Factor handles everything from emails to ERP integrations to no-touch updates via our no-login vendor portal
- Real-time vendor metrics reporting provides data on vendor performance that is always up-to-date
Results
“With Factor, we’re able to deliver to customer demand faster and more reliably.”
With Factor, Vecna gets:
- More frequent updates from vendors.
“We’re getting 5x more updates with Factor”
- More accurate (and more actionable) updates from vendors.
“Factor is getting us better ETAs — a lot of times we’d get ‘you’ll get your parts in Q4.’ With Factor that update is ‘you’re getting your parts on 10/5’.”
- 100% vendor adoption.
“We found vendors who used to not give us updates, they do give them in Factor.”
- Data that empowers the team.
“With Factor...I can see that, even if the vendor quotes me a 20 week lead time, 9 times out of 10 it ended up getting pushed back to 40 weeks. This allows me to plan better on future orders.”
- More time in the day to focus on building the business.
“Factor has changed the way we manage our supply chain from reactive to proactive by enabling us to manage by exception. This has freed my team up to focus on strengthening vendor relationships and sourcing new vendors.”