Success Story: Sakura

CHALLENGE

Sakura provides best in class automation and reliability as a leading ISO 13485 certified manufacturer and provider of integrated solutions for anatomic pathology and patients. With a large global network and strict regulatory requirements, Sakura requires technology partners and platforms they can count on.

As a longtime Oracle EBS & Intellinum customer, Sakura realized the value of a modern supply chain system and decided to implement Oracle Cloud SCM + FlexiPro mobile to drive inventory and manufacturing excellence.

OBJECTIVES

• Eliminate Manual Processes: Processes were manual and outdated resulting in hours spent fixing errors during receiving and shipping out incorrect product.
• Increase User Adoption: Completing processes for inventory and manufacturing movements were cumbersome resulting in poor user adoption and longer onboarding times for new employees.
• Increase Visibility: 90% of products are barcoded and lot controlled. Needed ability for real-time traceability within Oracle Fusion SCM.
• Increase Customer Service: Shipping errors led to a decline in OTIF

SOLUTION

After a successful go-live of Oracle Cloud ERP, Sakura saw an opportunity to further streamline operations with a robust mobile solution that could complement Oracle and address their unique requirements. Sakura partnered with Intellinum to fulfill their requirements.

The FlexiPro mobile app for Oracle Cloud SCM is being used extensively within operations to support mobile receiving, picking, quality, materials management, and manufacturing for work order picking.

The sales order picking form utilizes the barcode feature which eliminates manual data entry during the picking process. Scanning the barcode for Product and Lot-Number makes it easier for the picker in the warehouse to verify and confirm the right product and lot are being shipped as requested on the order. This enables users to pick more sales orders in less time. Our picking efficiencies have increased, and we now ship out the correct product the first time which increased our customer satisfaction.

Sakura also implemented custom logic that is created during processing the transaction across different functions such as picking, incoming receiving for PO/RMA, and QC inspection which helps the business process and the users to follow and enter the right information at every step. For example: during incoming PO receiving, for one of our product types, we would like the system to generate a unique internal lot-number for that product, which then can be traced back to the vendor lot-number in case of a recall. We were able to achieve this custom logic in FlexiPro which shows how powerful and simple it is to implement any business needs.

RESULTS

The successful implementation of FlexiPro resulted in several increased operational efficiencies including:

• Errors in receiving and picking drastically improved. Users no longer have to correct transactions as the mobile application provides data validation at each step.   
• Picking efficiency was increased by 75% and the accuracy of shipments has drastically improved with the ability to scan the lot-number during the picking process.
• Increase in employee engagement, user adoption since the screens are intuitive enough to learn easily.

“Giving our teams this product directly helped us train the warehouse personnel very quickly and users were able to adapt to this system in no time.” Sandeep Sindol – Systems Applications Manager