March 1996 € Volume 6 € No. 3
Red Pepper Response Agent Delivers for Anchor
By Monte Zweben
Anchor Glass Container Company was faced with a very difficult challenge.
One of the nation's largest producers of glass beverage containers, Anchor
was confronting tremendous order promising challenges. Since the glass bottle
business is very much a commodity business, if Anchor could not provide
firm, short lead-time commitments to customer orders at the time of inquiry,
they may very well lose the business. Furthermore, since glass containers
are relatively inexpensive to produce, minimizing transportation costs is
a critical dimension of the production planning problem.
Within the United States, Anchor has 13 plants and 79 production lines they
need to promise and intelligently schedule. When a customer calls and requests
100,000 beverage bottles be delivered to Chicago on Oct. 5, Anchor cannot
afford to provide an uninformed answer. To simply agree to the request might
result in the delivery date being missed, since the required capacity and
material may have already been allocated to another order . However, to
tell the customer "we'll get back to you on your actual delivery date"
effectively encourages them to continue shopping. What was required was
a real-time promise system that could consider material and capacity availability
across the supply chain, as well as factor in the associated transportation
costs-and do so in seconds while the customer remained on the phone. To
solve the problem, Anchor partnered with Red Pepper Software to implement
the Sales ResponseAgent.
The Sales ResponseAgent is now operational at Anchor Glass, providing real-time
promising on material and capacity availability, as well as the associated
transportation for orders across all 13 production facilities. The result
has been a dramatic transformation in the order promising process, wherein
customer commitments can be confidently met, and overall efficiency and
profitability are
improved.
Monte Zweben is a co-founder of Red Pepper Software, San Mateo, Calif.
Before that, he was a deputy branch chief at NASA Ames Research Center,
and was the designer and manager of the Space Shuttle Ground Processing
Project for NASA.
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