Organisation Name: Motorola Solutions
Industry: Technology
Name of contact if available:
Greg Brown- Chairman and CEO
Web References: twitter.com/motosolutions, motorolasolutions.com, facebook.com/motosolutions, linkedin.com/motosolutions, youtube.com/motosolutions, instagram.com/motosolutions
Company Overview:
Motorola was started in 1928 by two brothers, Paul and Joseph Galvin. Their first product was a battery eliminator which was a converter that allowed battery powered radios to be charged on household electricity. They pioneered mobile communication in the 1930’s with car radios. Decades later they would make the equipment that carried the first words from the moon in 1969. Today they do a fast spread of different things including supporting emergency response equipment for disaster relief efforts around the world.
Description of how social media is used for business performance:
Motorola partnered with E2Open in 2008 to design and build a strategic solution for information sharing to better the companies supply chain management. E2Opens software is a cloud based platform which promotes collaboration across various areas of any companies supply chain.
“The overarching supply chain objectives would be to improve customer responsiveness, increase inventory velocity, and scale supply chain processes across both supply- and demand-side operations. The most critical success metrics would be customer on-time delivery, first scheduled ship date, and inventory turns.” – Motorola representative
The software was built to revamp its supply network by enabling more real time information sharing within Motorola. This spanned across the company, suppliers and the end users. This software was so successful, in less than a year of launch the company saved more than 50 million dollars. These savings were mainly due to improvements made within time-to-market of new products. Also sourcing lead time went down by 40%, the release of orders to customers went down by 67%, time-to-market went down by 35% and the companies supply chain footprint was reduced by 60%.
Motorola has a vast customer base ranging from government to major global retailers. They have a network of over 25K indirect channel partners. The type of cloud based software that was created by E2open allows the entire supply chain to exchange information easily and effectively. The software enables them to connect on their own terms and eliminates the cost associated with testing and infrastructure maintenance. To date over 1,200 suppliers of Motorola have been given access to use this platform.
This software has been so successful for both E2 and Motorola, that they’ve won a variety of different awards in the technology sector. The particular platform Motorola uses won the 2011 PM100 Award, 2013 Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100, and the Manufacturing Leadership 100 (ML100).
Lessons for others:
There are many benefits to bringing on a supply chain platform to any company. Motorola is a perfect example of how this can benefit not only the company but also the bottom line. Here are some examples of the advantages to using a global supply chain platform:
- Enable visibility to real-time information across the supply chain
- Provide reasonable order execution within the window of customer expectation
- Allows for decision making to be more efficient and allows for more information to be provided across all sectors
- End-to-end visibility
- Consolidated reporting and analytics
Supply Chain Radio posted an interesting audio clip discussing such supply chain tactics.
Submitted By: Michelle Gardiner
To contact the author of this entry please email at: michelle.gardiner1@gmail.com
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