The importance of inventory management in a changing automotive industry

The automotive industry is changing at a blistering pace. With the explosion in the production of electric vehicles (EVs), the disruptive force of mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) business models – such as ride-hailing services – and the emergence of autonomous vehicles, it could be argued the industry will change more in the next decade or so than it has over the past century combined.   

Evolution 

Suppliers to this industry must evolve, too. Regardless of whether people are using their own vehicle, sharing one, or taking advantage of mass transportation, they are increasingly asking for more personalised experiences. This is causing a shift from traditional high-volume and low-mix production to low-volume and high-mix production, which presents a major challenge for automotive manufacturers and their suppliers. The more parts that must be produced, the more tools will be needed, and the larger the inventory of tools, the more complex and expensive it becomes to manage effectively.   

Simple solutions 

Fortunately, simple and cost-effective solutions to this problem are now available. Suppliers to the automotive industry are increasingly turning to cloud-based software to order and track their tools.  

CRIBWISE, for instance, is modular, customisable and easy to integrate, and grants enterprises of all sizes complete control over their tooling inventory with minimal effort and expense. The software eliminates administrative hassles, eradicates production delays caused by tooling stockouts and cuts excessive – often hidden – expenditure.  

Automation 

CRIBWISE helps manufacturers to manage their tooling inventory and streamline their purchasing and service management processes. By automating these crucial tasks, CRIBWISE alleviates the burden of administration, allowing businesses to allocate their resources to other areas. It can be integrated into existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to simplify the management of orders, the goods-received process and invoicing. Further, it is supplier- and hardware-agnostic, so there is no need to use just one supplier for tooling or the hardware used for dispensing it.  

For manufacturers with large and complex facilities, a central CRIBWISE hub can be established for the management of tooling, with satellite nodes spread out in key locations across the production floor.    

Secure data 

CRIBWISE will generate data in real time that owners and managers need to make strategic decisions about size of the workforce, their budgets and their inventory size. 

Finally, CRIBWISE is secure. We have a dedicated team of cybersecurity professionals that works around the clock to ensure that our customers’ data, and their businesses, are secure. The system supports single sign-on (SSO), an authentication scheme that allows a user to log-in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems.  

To find out more about CRIBWISE could help your business, click here.