Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to improve management performance by effectively responding to production needs and reducing inventory through synchronizing production planning and procurement in the aviation industry. In this study, the differences in production planning and execution were first analyzed in terms of demand, supply, inventory, and process using the big data collected from a domestic aircraft manufacturers. This paper analyzed the problems in procurement and inventory management using legacy big data from ERP system in the company. Based on the analysis, we performed a simulation to derive an efficient procurement and inventory management plan. Through analysis and simulation of operational data, we were able to discover procurement and inventory policies to effectively respond to production needs. Design/methodology/approach This is an empirical study to analyze the cause of decrease in inventory turnover and increase in inventory cost due to dis-synchronize between production requirements and procurement. The actual operation data, a total of 21,306,611 transaction data which are 18 months data from January 2019 to June 2020, were extracted from the ERP system. All them are such as basic information on materials, material consumption and movement history, inventory/receipt/shipment status, and production orders. To perform data analysis, it went through three steps. At first, we identified the current states and problems of production process to grasp the situation of what happened, and secondly, analyzed the data to identify expected problems through cross-link analysis between transactions, and finally, defined what to do. Many analysis techniques such as correlation analysis, moving average analysis, and linear regression analysis were applied to predict the status of inventory. A simulation was performed to analyze the appropriate inventory level according to the control of fluctuations in the production planing. In the simulation, we tested four alternatives how to coordinate the synchronization between the procurement plan and the production plan. All the alternatives give us more plausible results than actual operation in the past. Findings Based on the big data extracted from the ERP system, the relationship between the level of delivery and the distribution of fluctuations was analyzed in terms of demand, supply, inventory, and process. As a result of analyzing the inventory turnover rate, the root cause of the inventory increase were identified. In addition, based on the data on delivery and receipt performance, it was possible to accurately analyze how much gap occurs between supply and demand, and to figure out how much this affects the inventory level. Moreover, we were able to obtain the more predictable and insightful results through simulation that organizational performance such as inventory cost and lead time can be improved by synchronizing the production planning and purchase procurement with supply and demand information. The results of big data analysis and simulation gave us more insights in production planning, procurement, and inventory management for smart manufacturing and performance improvement.