ION Factory OS was built to optimize manufacturing efficiency through automation, real-time data integration, and enhanced collaboration. But how do you improve collaboration with your suppliers?
In a dynamic environment where schedules, production volumes, and requirements constantly shift, staying in sync with your suppliers requires organization and constant communication.
Why is vendor management so hard?
Manufacturers depend on a diverse array of suppliers in different time zones, using different systems, and of all shapes and sizes. Companies building complex hardware, where hundreds of thousands of parts go into a single product’s assembly, may be working with hundreds of suppliers. In these cases, it is impossible to get everyone to align on common processes and tools.
Even if you can get some of your suppliers to use your portal, it’s hard to sustain adoption, and many suppliers will buck this entirely. And can you blame them? We talked to someone at an advanced machine shop, and they explained why.
“I always had 15 tabs open for different supplier portals. I wanted to communicate effectively with my customers, but it was impossible to know which portal to check when. Even just remembering all of the logins was a pain.”
The way things have always been done isn’t cutting it.
For this reason, most coordination with suppliers still happens over email and spreadsheets - it’s the lowest common denominator for communication. Although this has the benefit of being universally adopted, it makes it challenging to organize information usefully. Providing visibility to other team members means tedious status meetings and a tangle of reply-all and forwarded threads.
The end result? Delivery dates are missed, and operations grind to a halt. One aerospace company recently told us they were missing fasteners needed to complete their latest build. It was a relatively inconsequential, low-dollar part, so no one thought to check in on the order. As it turns out, the supplier never acknowledged the order and dropped it completely.
Outside processing is another critical dependency that can put timelines at risk. Zoning, permits, and environmental regulations mean that manufacturers – even highly vertically integrated ones – often have no choice but to rely on external partners. We asked the CEO of an advanced machine shop about their strategy for managing their OSP vendors.
“We send a guy over with a bottle of tequila,” he shared.
Jokes aside, we frequently hear that managing OSP is a challenge for our customers, which is why we recently added functionality in ION to track Outside Processing on runs.
Enabling the future of Supply Chain management
ION’s open API is helping to democratize data in Manufacturing, and Companies like Silkline are developing for ION to help our customers seamlessly collaborate with their suppliers.
“Starting to build with ION was an obvious choice for us. With many of our initial customers in the aerospace & defense sector, we have a lot of natural overlap with ION customers. And their modern, open API made building our integration with ION easy – and we completed it in just a few weeks,” Silkline’s CTO, Brent Shulman, shared with us.
Silkline meets suppliers where they’re at by integrating with existing email-based workflows and doesn’t require any supplier onboarding. Our customers can automatically send ION Purchase Orders with just a few clicks and capture timestamped order acknowledgments.
Silkline’s early customers have seen up to 90% adoption of order acknowledgments. Over half of order acknowledgments occur within the first hour, and 85% within the first day.
We sat down with Silkline's CEO, Isaac Chambers, who told us that this was just the start. Silkline just launched a beta that allows suppliers to collect quotes from suppliers easily and has much more planned on their roadmap.
“Whether it’s collecting required documentation like CoCs or collaborating on issue tickets with suppliers, our customers just want a simple, frictionless way to work with suppliers that doesn’t require asking them to do something differently.”
ION users can request access to Silkline at silkline.ai.
To learn more about building with ION, visit our API documentation.