Introduction
Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
In industries such as Telecommunications, Utilities, Oil and Gas, and Mining, ensuring timely delivery of the right products is essential. Any failure in this area can lead to operational setbacks, inefficient labor usage, increased costs from unexpected asset movements, and long-lasting damage to a company’s reputation and financial health. Companies in these sectors require a cohesive method to align their maintenance, procurement, and logistics teams around a prioritized work order delivery system that promotes proactive decision-making. This proactive strategy facilitates timely maintenance execution and optimizes plant efficiency.
Existing solutions, while providing some level of visibility, often fall short of delivering a complete picture of where issues arise or a precise time-based breakdown of work order progress. It is crucial for maintenance, procurement, and logistics teams to have an end-to-end view of work order material progression, including predictions for delivery dates, potential delivery risks, and actionable recommendations to alleviate these risks.
AWS Supply Chain offers Work Order Insights to enhance tracking of work order materials, provide accurate delivery date forecasts, and help mitigate delays. Consequently, this leads to reductions in material expedites, material inventory buffers, and equipment downtime. Work Order Insights features:
- Comprehensive control over work order material tracking, enabling you to define and visualize the entire process from purchasing to delivery (e.g., purchase requisition, request for quote, purchase order, in-transit, inbound quality inspection, staging, pick, pack, and ship to work order site).
- Predictions for the completion dates of material progression through each phase until delivery.
- Monitoring of work order material delivery risks and their effects on the scheduled work start date.
- Recommendations for addressing issues within the process.
In this blog post, we will outline the steps to configure Work Order Insights within AWS Supply Chain, allowing you to stay informed of potential delays and receive risk mitigation strategies to keep your operations on schedule.
Configuring Work Order Insights within AWS Supply Chain
Work Order Insights can be quickly deployed and tailored to your organization’s processes without the need for replatforming, upfront licensing fees, or long-term commitments, all while benefiting from AWS’s security, reliability, scalability, and flexibility.
The setup of work order processes is critical to ensure that you derive meaningful data from Work Order Insights. AWS Supply Chain identifies processes within your data and presents them for easy configuration. Alternatively, you can manually create processes within the application if desired.
Prerequisites
This blog assumes a basic understanding of the services mentioned and that you have the following prerequisites:
- An Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) account. If you don’t have one, you can follow the step-by-step instructions in the account activation guide.
- An AWS Supply Chain account. If you’re not yet a customer, check out the AWS Supply Chain website for more information and to sign up.
You will begin on the main setup/configuration screen. Select the process you wish to configure, or choose “Create Process” to manually establish a new process.
Enter the Process Name and, if applicable, an Optional Site Identifier on the next page. The process builder allows you to expand on other milestones and details that require tracking.
Next, you will add milestones, which are the key steps that a work order process undergoes to indicate the start and completion of the process. Milestones can also be used to flag when a process is stalled or if follow-up actions are necessary. They utilize transactional data to define success criteria and advance work orders through each step. You can progressively add steps as they develop the workflow for tracking various milestones along the way.
Once milestones are defined, you will configure the Milestone Rules. These rules determine when a milestone is considered achieved within the defined process.
The milestone rules will also specify the Completion Criteria for each step. After entering and verifying the details, you can click the “Save and Exit” button to finalize the setup process.
You can view work orders that are late, on time, at risk, under observation, or delivered, and expand each work order to check the required materials on the Work Order Insights dashboard. Filters enable you to sort work orders by Location, Work Center, Resources, and Status: On Time, Watch, At Risk, Late, and Delivered, as well as search by work order or material, or utilize Sort and Column Visibility options for further customization.
You can examine the specific details regarding the procurement status of all items ordered as part of a work order, using filters to view a subset of procurement processes.
Additionally, you can monitor all transfer activities for parts requested as part of the work order and easily filter for specific views of the corresponding material summary. The information provided on the Work Orders, Procurement, and Logistics tab enhances work order visibility, offering insights that can proactively inform response and mitigation strategies should a potential supply chain risk emerge.
Conclusion
Work Order Insights provides organizations with improved visibility into potential delivery delays and risks through proactive monitoring, completion date forecasts, and valuable analytics. By configuring work order processes tailored to their operations, teams can effectively track material progression from procurement to final delivery. This empowers teams to take timely actions and implement mitigation strategies.
Moreover, it marks a transition from reactive to proactive decision-making, optimizing asset utilization and achieving operational excellence. The holistic view of work order material status offers seamless deployment, flexible configuration, trusted security, and scalability, helping to eliminate gaps in operational visibility and mitigate risks. Organizations can leverage this capability to streamline work order execution, decrease material expedites and inventory buffers, enhance collaboration, and maximize efficiency.
Getting started with AWS Supply Chain is straightforward and does not require upfront licensing fees or long-term commitments. Embark on your journey with these three steps:
- Learn about AWS Supply Chain: Visit the AWS Supply Chain website to delve into the product’s features and capabilities.
- Get a technical overview: Check out the AWS Workshop Studio for a self-paced technical walkthrough. Here, you’ll discover how to create an instance, ingest data, navigate the user interface, create insights, and generate demand plans.
- Start using AWS Supply Chain: After you’re ready, access the AWS Console and begin optimizing your supply chain operations with AWS Supply Chain’s effective, data-driven management tools. This is an excellent resource to help you get started.
Also, if you’re interested in enhancing your leadership style, consider reading about different approaches to leadership here. Furthermore, for insights on hiring practices, it’s worth referencing this article. Finally, you can find detailed information about the hiring process at Amazon here.