With a 130-year history, Toshiba Corporation is among the largest international IT and electronic companies. Toshiba Europe GmbH located in Neuss, Germany, is the European headquarters for Toshiba Corporation serving the European, Middle East, and African (EMEA) markets.
The Toshiba Europe Challenge
With the majority of manufacturing done in Asia, Toshiba has several sales and distribution sites serving the EMEA PC mobile computer market. Each organization is responsible for the purchasing, sales, and inventory (PSI) process for their respective sales regions. Toshiba Europe GmbH's role is to verify PSI results, consolidate them for an integrated view and communicate it to Toshiba Corporation in Tokyo. As a distribution network, Toshiba Europe's main pain point is supply allocation — dynamically aligning supply with demand across regional sites.
The EMEA mobile PC industry is growing; product lifecycles are shortening; and the market is becoming increasingly fragmented. This has meant the amount of data handled by Toshiba Europe has grown enormously, making it ever more difficult and time-consuming to consolidate and analyze data. Overall, the systems supporting the PSI process were based on Excel worksheets, which could no longer adequately cope with the volume of data or complexity of the functions. Toshiba Europe required a solution that would reduce the operational workload of processing an increasing number of SKUs; enhance the granularity and integrity of the information gathered and disseminated; and most importantly, leverage the information to improve the PSI process.
The Kinaxis Advantage
Toshiba Europe selected RapidResponse™ because it could seamlessly consolidate demand data from multiple sources, while also offering users the ability to easily work with the data to develop and analyze various supply plans in real time. Despite its structured PSI process, RapidResponse enables Toshiba to be a more responsive organization, providing it with a level of flexibility not achieved before given its fixed planning schedules and procedures.
The implementation time and costs were low compared to the other solutions considered, and RapidResponse integrates fully with its Oracle ERP and product roadmap systems. With a user friendly and familiar Excel-type interface, no extensive user training was required, so the time-to-value was compelling.
The Results Speak for Themselves
Today, with RapidResponse, the PSI process has been both enhanced and streamlined to the benefit of Toshiba's bottom line.
Non-value adding steps were removed from the PSI process, while data integrity and synchronization has improved immensely, reducing the need for manual intervention and the probability of error. PSI analysis and results are now executed on sales territory instead of sales organization (one organization can be responsible for several territories), which has resulted in significantly improved forecast accuracy and hence, better purchase plans submitted to Toshiba Tokyo.
The initial deployment of the solution took less than five months. Subsequent deployment phases have focused on further leveraging the tool.
