Reverse Supply Chain Solution for Process Industries

Our Reverse Supply Chain solution, Alchemy™, offers customers an opportunity to redeploy and re-use materials intelligently and to optimise inventory management within their overall supply chain.

Our focus is to improve your Reverse Supply Chain processes, increase overall efficiencies, reduce operational costs, and improve revenue streams while ensuring compliance with environmental and audit regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley (SOX). The achievement of these goals provides companies with significant competitive advantages.

Cost Implications

The overall cost of product and scrap material returns to manufacturers has become very significant. The Aberdeen Group estimates that high-tech companies alone spend approximately 8 per cent of revenue just to manage their reverse logistics function. For the Process Manufacturing industry we have no concrete figures, but According to Devangshu Dutta, Director of a supply chain solutions company, "nearly 20 per cent of everything that is sold in America is returned". With these costs adding to overall operating expenses, how can an organization uncover hidden value from material returns – and recover bottom-line revenue from scrap?

Why Alchemy for Process Manufacturing Enterprise?

For most organisations, materials are returned through the reverse logistics function – whether they are product returns, damaged goods or warehouse returns. In most instances, the reverse logistics model employed is designed to minimise costs, allowing materials to accumulate over time and eventually be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner or, at the very least, in an environmentally compliant manner.

For the Process Manufacturing industry recovering value from returned products can be significantly improved with a timely inspection process designed to identify hidden value before scrapping. Unfortunately for many firms, scrap material already sent for disposal could have become a new revenue stream. In fact, we have also found that materials that were designated as second-grade, could also have generated more revenue if they had been reworked.

In addition, with our data module, analysis over time of the most cost effective pathways is developed, providing real insight that can feed strategic decision making when looking at total cost of goods.

How does Alchemy work?

Alchemy is a solution that has been developed with the benefit of many years of experience in the supply chain world. It is however, customer driven: we look at your processes and work with your experts to learn how to apply Alchemy to your processes for maximum benefit.

Alchemy is a process based system which will generate a clear workflow for your people, offering them only relevant data to focus on at any one time.

Alchemy will incorporate business rules that we develop with the customer to help automatically monitor inventory status and offer a health dashboard.

Alchemy and your Systems

Our development team for reverse supply chain management reviews a technology-driven organisation’s current reverse logistics practices. This enables us to help develop and introduce a comprehensive inspection process and best-practice model that can help your organisation review returned materials and make the correct decisions to generate revenue and reduce inventory.

Alchemy is ERP system neutral, we can link into any data-sources and drive out the value that is hidden within your current applications. It is also portable, so you can apply the same model through mergers and acquisitions, driving immediate benefit from these opportunities.

If you’re wrestling with the high costs of managing your current distressed inventory and reverse supply chain function and would like to implement best-practice methods to recover lost revenue from your reverse supply chain, Alchemy will probably provide the solution.

Pulling it all together: The Alchemy Modules

We have developed four specific modules that can be added and combined to achieve optimal value as and when you need them for the following functions

• Transform
  Distressed inventory re-use/remanufacturing
• Elixir
  Aging Inventory Monitoring and use optimisation
• Alum
  Second Grade Evaluation
• Petra
  Information Discovery, Analysis and Value

It may be that you are already active in these areas and Alchemy has the ability to support and enhance these activities, as well as making the handling of the information involved much more manageable.

Alchemy  Markets

Alchemy can be applied in many markets that are involved in process manufacturing. Indeed it is specifically designed to work in the management of materials that cannot be “componentised” in the standard way.

Biotechnology

Industry that is concerned with the application of knowledge about living organisms and their components to industrial products and processes.

Chemical Industry

Manufacture of pharmaceuticals, paints, toiletries, varnishes, plastics, synthetic rubber and industrial gases.

Food and Beverages

Manufacture of all food and drink including bakery, dairy, meat and poultry.

Tobacco

Manufacture of all tobacco and tobacco-related products.

Metals and Engineered Metal Products

Production, processing and distribution of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, including the recycling of the materials at the end of their useful life.

Pharmaceuticals

Production of everything from antibiotics to the contraceptive pill. Development of products that treat common and life-threatening illnesses and ailments.

Polymers

Four discrete process areas: plastics processing; rubber processing; polymer composite processing; and sign making.

Other Process Manufacturing

Production of building products, coatings, extractives, glass, printing and paper and furniture.