KnarrTek Decision Support Time & Cost Savings

In many manufacturing plants and distribution warehouses, in the manufacturing, food, and medical supply chains, operations managers waste over 50% of their time manually gathering and analyzing data. This includes time spent in "coordination meetings" and time spent analyzing stacks of reports or "walking the floor" to try to determine when problems are occurring that they need to pay attention to.

KnarrTek applies the power of Artificial Intelligence to save operations managers and their staff members much of this wasted time by:

1. Enabling the capture of operational data in real-time by material handlers, machine operators, and other production workers, so as to provide real-time operational status information, for operations managers, when and where needed.
2. Monitoring the flow of information in real-time to alert managers when there are events they need to pay attention to by means of text message or Email.
3. Automatically moving information between the multiple systems used by most organizations so that operations mangers have the information they need, in the systems they use on a regular basis, in a timely manner, without the need for duplicate data entry.
4. Automatically creating purchase orders, work orders, pick and ship orders, for each manufacturing plant and warehouse, in response to incoming customer orders.
5. Automatically scheduling work in each plant and warehouse to make sure that each customer order get out on time.
6. Warning material handlers, machine operators, and other production workers when they are about to make an operational mistake.
7. Handling routine chores, such as automatically reordering inventory or sending Emails to customers to alert them when their orders have been shipped.
8. Providing an Enterprise Management Portal through which managers can get a real-time view of the status of operations across all warehouses and manufacturing plants in their enterprise.
9. Capturing materials traceability data such as to enable rapid response to the discovery of potential defects in the products shipped to customers or the raw materials used to make those products.
10. Using model-based reasoning to predict the estimated cost and delivery time for customer orders based on real-time analysis of the operational data.

This enables manufacturers and industrial distributors to transition from after the fact reporting about what went wrong yesterday to being able to see the status of customer orders, project inventory, work-in-process, jobs and materials in real-time anywhere they have an Internet connection.

The KnarrTek real-time AI based decision support software can also:

• Dynamically schedule the work of materials handlers and machine operators to help ensure customer orders get delivered on-time.
• Assist managers with dynamically planning the purchasing and/or making of materials needed for customer orders.
• Prevent operational and data collection mistakes as well as provide alerts to production and materials mangers, customer support staff, materials handlers and others when there are situations that need their attention before and not after problems occur.
• Capture accurate job-cost data, materials traceability data, and operational performance data.

Depending on the scope of the deployment, a typical KnarrTek decision support deployment has been proven to save between one and five (or more) full-time equivalent people at a loaded labor cost from $60,000 to over $100,000 per year each, as well as increasing sales through improved customer satisfaction. In all cases, the cost of implementing these systems have paid for themselves in less than a year and in many cases, within a few months. Then the on-going cost of subscribing to fully maintained versions of the software ranges from around $400/month to about $2,000 per month.