Operations

Operations departments work to maximize the value produced by company resources such as equipment, facilities, and people at the lowest possible cost.

Efficient business processes maximize the productivity of your employees. Well-planned production schedules maximize equipment utilizations and increase your capacity for new business. Optimal inventory policies reduce inventory costs and improve customer service capabilities.

Each of these activities must carefully balance value and cost. However, the analysis into this balance is difficult, involving many people, competing priorities, and varied sources of uncertainty. Vanguard makes easy the process of modeling these complex interactions by leveraging your company's collective intelligence and our proven analytical methods.

Bringing Together People, Analytics, and Systems

The Vanguard System™ is a comprehensive business solution for improving the quality, reliability, and speed of management decisions. It does this by helping you Collaborate with colleagues on important plans, Analyze alternatives using state-of-the-art modeling and simulation techniques, Automate routine decisions using expert system technology, and Improve overall management effectiveness by adding structure to a normally chaotic process.

Business improvement is all about working smarter. Vanguard brings together the people, analytics, and systems required to help your business operate intelligently.

What Can Vanguard Do For You?

Here are just a few ways Vanguard supports operations departments:

• Operational efficiency: Conduct process improvement/Six Sigma projects to reduce costs, cycle times, and waste.
• Capacity planning: Evaluate your global capacity needs as your business grows and expands. Perform operational and financial justification studies for adding staff, purchasing next-generation equipment, and investing in costly new facilities.
• Sales and operations planning (S&OP): Enable real-time collaboration between Marketing & Sales and Operations to ensure production capacity can profitably support customer demand (and vice versa).
• Project analysis: Most projects are complex, operate under tight budgets and timelines, and involve many people and resources. Vanguard can help elicit input from the right people, forecast cost, and account for risks properly during the planning phase to ensure your projects stay on budget and on schedule.
• Resource optimization: Determine how to most efficiently allocate scarce resources such as people, equipment, and cash.
• Supply chain planning: Optimize your production schedules, inventory levels, distribution plans, and more.
• Expert Systems: Automate routine processes and guide users through complex decision-making processes using interactive, Web-based question and answer sessions. Reduce administration costs while improving the consistency, reliability, and speed of performance.