Winchester Business Systems receives the Lotus Beacon Award for its work with Lexmark International.

Lotus Beacon Award

Lexmark -- Lexmark International, Lexington, KY -- Lexmark uses a network of Notes clients and servers to enter, collect, massage, and foreword sales forecasts from 80 countries to the marketing function. Marketing applies seasonality and "deals" and automatically drops the forecast into the master schedule for manufacturing. The result is a sales forecast that is common to the entire company. This "monthly" process has been reduced from a six-week process to a six-day process. Manufacturing's commitment to the countries about what is to be and was manufactured is automatically fed back to the originating country managers.

Worldwide supply and demand processing is accomplished for Lexmark International, a $2 billion manufacturer of laser and personal printers. Sales forecasts from 80 countries are collected by the marketing department, massaged, and submitted automatically to the master production scheduling module of the AS/400-based manufacturing system. Finished goods inventory "netting" is automatically applied to the sales forecasts as well as previous forecasts. Forecasts developed by country marketing managers are aggregated by area planning managers. A Business Area manager from operations "oversees" the inventory netting process and OK's the netted forecast to be submitted to corporate headquarters. A headquarters "forecaster" applies the final touches to the aggregate forecast from all areas. The forecaster applies new promotions, special bids, and several other functions to each printer, typewriter, special feature, and supply line item.

The appropriate Production Planner now applies the previous production schedule and last period's completions to the forecast. The outcome is a "production plan" that is automatically interfaced to the company's AS/400-based manufacturing control system. The manufacturing control system, often called the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) system, incorporates the production plan into this and subsequent period's master production schedule. Periodic production completions are fed back to the supply and demand system such that allocations by country can be accomplished.

The system also automatically tracks international "intransit" inventories as they are shipped from the factories to distribution centers.

It's all done in Lotus Notes!

The initial installation between the European sales and marketing locations and distribution centers is complete and totally functional. European locations acted as the pilot locations representing the most disparate requirements for functionality.
Forecasts were originally done by a lengthy manual process. The process depended upon the mailing of blank forecasts on Excel spreadsheets by the area marketing manager to each country marketing manager. Each country manager would complete his/her individual forecast when she/he got to it and foreword it by mail to the area manager where it was again reviewed. Changes to each country's forecast were not coordinated and were difficult. The remainder of the system was a series of copying and rekeying excercies of aggregate forecasts into the next level's spreadsheet. The process is/was fraught with timing and data inconsistencies and errors. As each edition could layer error upon error, the resulting forecasts did not represent a realist view of the printer marketplace. That's all changed now with the new system.

By using a Lotus Notes-based application to communicate estimates of product demand, the reduction in cycle time from six weeks to six days has given each participant in the process more time to prepare his version of the forecast. When the production plan is fed back to the original country marketing manager, he knows exactly what products he will have for sale and when he will have them.

The supply and demand system provides each participant with data concerning current on-hand and intransit inventories as well as actual sales. This information is downloaded by using a series of database stripping routines on various AS/400-based applications in several countries. At each area location where inventory and sales information is stripped, it is automatically downloaded into the Lotus Notes-based application using Application Partners Inc.'s (API's) Workflow Innovation Toolkit (WIT). WIT provides for many different necessary workflow functions that have been directly incorporated into the overall application's design and daily operation. Winchester has developed multiple Lotus Notes applications for Lexmark International, many of them based on Winchester's commercially available Lotus Notes application products. The supply and demand system coupled with the sales force automation systems that Winchester has developed and deployed at Lexmark have helped in the deployment of nearly 200 Lotus Notes servers and 5,500 clients.