Fall 2022 Update – Vendor Portal and TimeWarp

Everything in this update is designed to support your organization through these challenging times. Uncertainty and volatility are in our sights right now.

Vendor Portal

In September, we introduced a new vendor portal to help you and your vendors communicate more closely and effectively on changing supply chain conditions. With the new portal, your vendors can engage Aligni directly and keep your RFQs and purchases fresh, accurate, and dependable.

The portal, shown below, has a clean, dignified look and feel. We know your vendors are busy and support a lot of customers, so we’ve designed the portal to be simple, easy-to-use, and welcoming. The more your contacts engage the tool, the more dependable the information is to you. (Custom branding is coming soon!)

Vendors get a single, unified perspective on all past and current business including RFQs and POs. Any un-viewed RFQs or POs are highlighted as new and Aligni encourages them to establish promise dates for each item giving you the best available information at all times.

A complete list of Open Items (a.k.a. Backlog) is also available. Your vendors can review all open items in a familiar format and sort for easy review. Promise dates and status updates can be entered in real-time and Aligni keeps track of the history of these updates to help you better understand the volatility and mitigate supply chain risks.

Safety Stock TimeWarp

The Safety Stock Manager (SSM) got a major upgrade with the introduction of TimeWarp (beta). The SSM tracks your current inventory and safety stock status so that you and your team can identify issues, work with vendors, and prevent a line-down condition.

Today’s supply chain is full of surprises and long lead times. The best way to stay on top of these challenges is to look into the future and identify issues before they affect your production. TimeWarp uses your production schedule in the build manager to understand when production demand will cause inventory to dip below safety stock minimums.

With this knowledge, you can place scheduled POs with your vendors, stay lean, and remain on schedule. If your production schedule or order promise dates shift, TimeWarp reflects this information instantly.

Material Shortage Report

The Material Shortage Report (MSR) is the workhorse of your material requirements planning routine and we’ve just updated it with new filtering capabilities to help you drill down and focus on what’s most important.

• Use a range of dates to focus on specific periods of your production schedule.
• Did one of your manufacturers just push out lead times? Filter by manufacturer to take a broad look at all of the impacts across your entire production.
• Planning for those dreaded 52-week lead times? Filter by part type and schedule POs to keep your line running and product flowing.
• Select related builds and look at product (or product-line) specific production and avoid the noise of other activities.
• Used saved reports to make your daily milk run faster and more efficient.

What’s Next?

What else can we do to help? Email us at [email protected] so we can understand what tools would help you be more efficient and productive.