Michael Gibby

Bringing years of experience implementing Oracle Fusion and EBS in Supply Chains for drug product manufacturing supply chains, at Huron I am focused on inventory and procurement implementation projects for Healthcare and Hospital supply chains. It is always a fun challenge to consolidate multiple legacy systems into a single procurement platform, leveraging tools like APIs to streamline the data entry and workload for the teams who put patient care at the forefront of their mission.

As a Manager in The Hackett Group’s Oracle Cloud consulting branch, my day to day is putting years of practical and Oracle ERP experience to work for clients who are implementing Oracle Cloud Fusion ERP software in their supply chain and manufacturing facilities. My years of experience as an end user guiding on site implementations helps me to see the unique challenges that each client has, and address them with a detailed implementation plan.

Supply Chain includes the materials management, as well as long and short term scheduling and some aspects of customer order management. It starts with new product development projects which are nearing completion, and customer forecast for reorders.

We have a continued reliance on procurement and inventory management teams, but we add the complexity of mid and short term scheduling, which help executives take decisions based on cash flow and capacity constraints or excess, and guide the floor to minimize labor costs and downtime while producing more efficiently every week.

At this level, we are also guiding our factories in Germany, Poland and South Korea with the experience and processes we have put in place in Florida and the Dominican Republic. Implementing Oracle at each site allows a true global planning vision and unlocks efficiencies in every area.

My teams have implemented improved open order reporting and management to ensure we are communicating and resolving problems with vendors and customers. We have improved on time in full deliveries by 40% while implementing economic order quantity policies which have increased flexibility, allowing us to launch orders larger than a million pieces faster than our competition.

The Materials Planning position brings together three important teams that control all aspects of item management. Materials planning starts with item creation, where the Data Specialists collect details about the item to ensure it can be purchased and handled efficiently while keeping new product introduction on time.

Then, the procurement team takes over, determining the economic order quantity and grouping items appropriately to minimize inventory but supply orders on time. Weekly follow up comparing demand to estimated shipment dates keeps the supply chain moving even if details change after the initial purchase.

Finally, the inventory management team analyzes inventory values, movement and forecasts to help procurement, warehouse and finance stay aligned. Those three teams combined are vital to keeping the supply chain supplied, while keeping inventory levels low enough to allow for flexibility in a changing marketplace.

With a new inventory planning method for critical supplies, we have reduced workload while eliminating risk of stockouts, but also reduced excess inventory purchases and improved reliability of estimated arrival time data in the shared computer system.

Inventory management is a fascinating position that sits in between Finance, Planning, R&D, Customer Service, and Production. Every department has their own goals and focuses, which have to be taken into consideration.

From August of 2013 to February of 2014, I was an Investor Reporting Analyst at Ocwen. I really enjoyed the challenge of working with a small team in the US, a second small team in another state, and two large teams in India.

My team’s job was to keep an eye on thousands of bank accounts and investors, who were all due a monthly payment for a package of loans. I had to make sure they got the payments on time, which meant coordinating all of those teams and making sure no one made a mistake.

Of course, that’s too simple, so to complicate things, our other goal was merging the three team’s functions so more work could be done in one office, and the other teams could switch to other tasks.

And, every month the number of accounts was growing! I was motivated by working with the team to automate the quality checks, and analysis required, which allowed fewer people to oversee more work, and complete it with fewer mistakes. Investors were happy, and I was happy to have picked up a lot of skills in Microsoft Excel VBA. For example, I was able to reduce month end reporting from taking three people, three days, to a single person working for only a few hours.

Managing production at a rate of 1 million finished goods a week, in three shifts of production in four sub processes, is a constant challenge to maximize efficiency and quality while managing costs.