App Portfolio Development For Manufacturers: Balance Customer Service With Efficiency

Henry Ford's 1913 policy of offering consumers cars in any color they liked as long as it was black perfectly illustrates the problem for manufacturers trying to balance consumer service with operational effectiveness. Almost 100 years later, firms such as LG Electronics offer a vast range of consumer electronics product variants and a highly competitive choice of features and options to customers buying air conditioning equipment. Firms competing on choice need to manage short production runs in order to respond to changes in demand, challenging planners' ability to use standard enterprise resource planning (ERP) effectively to plan and sequence production batches to make the best use of available production capacity. LG Electronics deployed a consumer-responsive scheduling technology to complement its global ERP deployment and maintain its competitive range of offerings while releasing $74 million in working capital and 14,000 square meters in space in its production facilities.