Utilizing AIM Vision EDI and Order Management to Analyze Your Readiness to Return to Manufacturing

We are going to start a weekly blog series to address some of the critical questions you will need to consider as many automotive suppliers go back in to production after their state imposed stay home, stay safe executive orders in response to the COVID-19 health crisis.

There are any number of resources out there to help guide you through the health and safety aspects, and we encourage you to visit the sites like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for their Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019, and the Original Equipment Suppliers Association for the Health and Safety Resources for Suppliers in a Coronavirus Environment.

For the first blog in this series, we want to help you answer some of the questions surrounding EDI and Order Management, and what functions in AIM Vision can assist you with this task.

Based on our analysis, within our customer base, most automotive EDI should be current, if your EDI has stopped or it is not current AIM believes to be an anomaly, if you are experiencing this you may want to contact AIM Support who can help determine if you are having an issue with your VAN.

How to Know if Your Customers Are Sending New Order Requirements?

One of the easiest ways to determine if your customers are sending new order requirements is to run the AIM Vision Blanket Detail Summary Report by Item Number or Customer Part Number. This option is located in the Orders application, under Order Entry > Order Edit Lists. This report can be printed by destination code, or for a range of destination codes. Users can also opt to print the report for active orders, inactive orders or both. This report identifies the order information including the last Release Date. We recommend that you choose to output this report to an Excel file, which will allow for sorting of the Release Date column. You can then quickly see if your releases are current.

How to Appraise Your Sales Forecast?

On March 25, 2020 Colin Couchman, Director of Global Automotive Sales Forecasting at IHS Markit forecasted 2020 US auto sales to be 14.4 million units, a volume downgrade of 2.4 million units for 2020 from prior forecasts. Keeping a close eye on your sales forecast will be critical moving forward, and you can utilize the AIM Vision Sales Forecast Report (by Customer Part, Item Number, Destination or Product Line) to see your forecasted units and sales dollars. These reports are run for a base date with bucketed reporting to see past due, daily, weekly or monthly sales forecast information of JIT orders, release orders or both. Be on the lookout for large adjustments from prior forecasts, and if there are no adjustments, consider starting a dialog with your customer so you are best prepared for the remainder of 2020.

How to Assess Your Current Inventory On Hand?

One of the most critical things you will need to do is to understand your current inventory status and evaluate if your supply chain will be functioning enough to help meet your inventory needs. The AIM Vision Inventory Days on Hand Report will help you determine the number of days that a quantity on hand can cover based on a daily average usage amount. The daily usage amount can either be taken from the Planned Weekly Usage field in the Item Master – Manufacturing window, or calculated based on the MRP demands. In order to calculate the daily average amount, the quantity required will be divided by the number of days between the Base Date in the Forecast Code table (for the Forecast Code entered), and the Horizon End Date entered during report generation.

We hope this helps gets you ready to re-open your plant. Reach out to the AIM Consultancy Group or your project manager if you are seeking any assistance interpreting your EDI and Orders.

Check back next week for our next blog in the series.