A comparison of manufacturing companies in Sweden and their use of parameters within material planning

Abstract

To reach high performance in an effective and efficient way, material planning is an aspect to consider. Material planning has different effects depending on how it is applied within the company’s environment. Furthermore, managing parameters within material planning is one way to balance supply and demand in an organization. How manufacturing companies are working and using the parameters within material planning is an interesting theme that is relevant to investigate today and hence this theses project was requested. This master thesis project was a collaboration with the consultant company Meridion AB who is acting within the area of supply chain management. The focus of this thesis project was regarding the effects of parameters within material planning and how it can be used by companies in order to be more efficient and effective. This thesis project has been divided into two parts, where the first part was a comparative study of 10 manufacturing companies within different industries. The analysis has been done by quantitative analysis in the business intelligence tool Qlik for the comparative part of the study. Furthermore, a deeper investigation was performed, and a qualitative analysis was conducted at the case company KraftPowercon Sweden AB, this was considered as the second part of this thesis project. The findings showed that there is a high variation between the companies and the frequency of updating parameters and conducting changes in their planning data, hence there is potential for development. The items analyzed were purchased items that were considered as active for the companies. During the analysis, different factors were taken into consideration in order to find similarities and differences between the companies. These factors were the items’ lead time, material planning method and sourcing strategy. Regarding the second part of the study, where a deeper investigation was conducted at KraftPowercon, it was possible to understand underlying causes of the quantitative data and to understand the findings. This master thesis aimed to find relevant conclusions and recommendations in order for both customers and consultants to continue the work with parameters within material planning. However, the main conclusion is that there is a need to work more with parameters and to implement a structured way of working with it. Furthermore, due to the high amount of data, a business intelligence tool like Qlik could be used as a helping tool to manage the data.