Ultriva’s Director of Engineering Looks at the Future of Kanban

According to Narayan Laksham, CEO of Ultriva, (www.ultriva.com), “We design lean manufacturing software and solutions that drive lean processes across the supply chain, from suppliers to customers.” Ultriva's flagship product, Ultriva Electronic Kanban, eliminates stock-outs while reducing inventory levels up to 75 percent. Ultriva Lean Scheduling complements demand-driven replenishment strategies by optimizing production schedules in real time around the most variable customer demand. Ultriva Supplier Replenishment extends the replenishment capabilities of Kanban to include schedule-based replenishment, discrete POs, min/max, consignment and VMI (vendor-managed inventory) replenishment methods. Ultriva's products are in use in more than 100 plants worldwide, incorporating more than 4,000 suppliers, transacting over one billion dollars of inventory and reducing manufacturing costs for industry leaders such as AGCO, Emerson, Ingersoll-Rand, McKesson, Rexnord, and Timken.

According to Pushparaj Shanmugam, Director of Engineering for Ultriva, “Our main differentiator is our solution is built based on Lean Manufacturing principles. We did not look into the MRP/ERP approach instead we came up with the Kanban/Just-in-time/Lean Manufacturing solution that would complement their MRP/ERP solutions. In some ways I would call Ultriva a Rule Breaker.”

Some of the main features that differentiate Ultriva from other solutions include:

• Powerful Loopsize wizard helps to reduce inventory
• Powerful Auto-Resizing tool helps our customers to resize their Kanban loop based on historical information or based on some forecasts
• Patent pending Lean Assessment tool helps our customers to pick right Kanban products
• Categorizing Red, Yellow and Green based on the inventory level helps our customer to act quickly on their inventory
• Inventory Health dashboard helps buyers and suppliers to see the data consistently
• Exception based alerts
• Intuitive Kanban Board
• Production Sequencing for Internal Kanban

Shanmugam also noted, “In the past 10 years we have introduced various modules, and features to our products. Currently we are working on our next generation product release which we call LeanSuite. This is one of most ambitious projects from Ultriva’s history. This product offering will bring our various modules into a suite of applications and our customer will be able to enable/disable the applications and features based on their needs.  Additionally we also think the natural evolution would be from here is what we call Lean ERP. Lean ERP system would be ideal for many mid-size companies to manage their inventory and financial in a single portal. This would be similar to how current on-demand based solutions which helps companies to reduce cost on CRM.”

Ultriva

www.ultriva.com

Cindy McGowan

pr@ultriva.com

408.248.9803