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Case study deck · 9 slides

Manufacturing & EV

Production shortfall and inventory cost, seen 12 weeks ahead

A large EV manufacturer

Audit & TeardownProcess Redesign & BuildAdoption & Enablement
01 / 09

The challenge

What was broken

A year-old SAP rollout still couldn't say how many vehicles would get built next week: a wiring harness existed under three different SKUs across sales, production and procurement, none reconciled. The real system was a shadow one, three people cross-checking exports by phone, taking one to two full days, and still stale by Thursday's Ops-Finance call.

Hours spent reconciling shortfall data by hand, per weekly cycle, before the planning layer went live
02 / 09

The approach

Scored on the Durable AI Index

We didn't touch SAP for three weeks. We traced where the shadow spreadsheets diverged from the SAP export, producing a crosswalk across ~1,400 SKUs. On top of that we built a planning layer, not a replacement, joining the same tables against supplier capacity and inventory, validated weekly against the analyst's manual numbers before cutover. Only then did we fix the underlying master-data conflicts.

DURABLE AI INDEXImpact92Feasibility76Stickiness8440at startafter redesign
High impact, low stickiness. The gap was the workflow, not the model.
03 / 09

What we built

The system, not just the model

We redesigned the workflow around the model, then built the pieces that make it run every day.

  1. 1

    Part-number crosswalk reconciling ~1,400 SKUs across two legacy conventions

  2. 2

    Nightly pipeline joining SAP production, procurement and sales exports

  3. 3

    Live dashboard: vehicle plan vs. shortfall, supplier capacity, inventory cost

  4. 4

    Documented SOPs assigning ownership and escalation for each data feed

04 / 09

Inside the build

Production shortfall and inventory cost, next 12 weeks

Daily vehicle plan against parts shortfall, supplier capacity and inventory cost, all reading off one reconciled part mapping.

Projection prep: 1 hrSKUs reconciled: ~1,400WC exposure lead: +6 wks

Tools & systems

SAP MM/PP exportsProcurement PO feedSales demand filePart-number crosswalkPlanning pipelineOps-Finance dashboard

01 · Source systems

3 feeds, previously unreconciled

SAP production exportsProcurement PO trackerSales demand spreadsheetLegacy plant part codes

02 · Reconciliation layer

~1,400 SKUs mapped

Part-number crosswalkMaster-data conflict logNightly validation checks

03 · Planning layer

Live, 12-week and 12-month views

Vehicle plan vs. shortfallSupplier capacity vs. planRegional inventory costWorking-capital exposure

04 · Decision layer

Weekly Ops-Finance call

Shortfall triageSupplier escalationOwner sign-off on SOP exceptions
05 / 09

Results

What good looks like

Real-time

Data flow across sales, production planning, procurement, and supply chain

1–2 days → 1 hr

Weekly production projection prep time

6 weeks

Earlier visibility of working-capital exposure

SOPs

Roles, responsibilities, and processes documented and standardized

WEEKLY PROJECTION PREP16Before (1–2 days)1After (1 hour)
06 / 09

How it stuck

Adoption is the deliverable

The Thursday call now opens with the dashboard already up, not an argument about whose spreadsheet is right. The projection that took two days now takes about an hour. Six weeks in, the dashboard caught a battery-component shortfall ten days before the old process would have.

050100month 6This engagementTypical pilot
Weekly attendance using the live dashboard as primary source, vs. typical planning-tool adoption at comparable plants
07 / 09
“I used to walk in hoping my spreadsheet matched finance's. Now I walk in already knowing what we're going to argue about, which is the actual work.”

Production Planning Analyst, Vehicle Assembly

08 / 09

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09 / 09