Mitigating operational risks with AWS Supply Chain Work Order Insights

Introduction

For industries like Telecommunications, Utilities, Oil and Gas, and Mining, ensuring the right products arrive at the right place and time is mission-critical. Failure to do so can result in operational delays, poor labor utilization, increased costs due to unplanned asset/product movements, and irreversible damage to an organization’s reputation and financial performance. Organizations in these industries need a way to connect their maintenance, procurement, and logistics teams around a prioritized work order delivery mechanism to shift from reactive to proactive decision-making. This proactive approach supports timely maintenance execution and maximizes plant efficiency.

Current solutions, even when providing visibility, fail to give organizations a comprehensive view of where problems specifically occur or an exact time-based breakdown of work order progress. Maintenance, procurement, and logistics personnel require an end-to-end view of work order material progress, including delivery date predictions, work order delivery risks, and recommendations to mitigate those risks.

AWS Supply Chain offers Work Order Insights so you can improve work order material tracking, gain accurate on-site delivery date predictions, and mitigate delivery delays. As a result, you can reduce material expedites, reduce material inventory buffers, and reduce equipment downtime. Work Order Insights provides:

1. Full control of work order material tracking granularity, including defining and viewing the end-to-end process sequence from purchasing through delivery (e.g., purchase requisition, request for quote, purchase order, in-transit, inbound quality inspection, staging, pick, pack, and ship to work order site).
2. Forecasting the completion dates of material progression through each remaining process until delivery.
3. Tracking work order material delivery risk and its impact on the planned work start date.
4. Defining recommendations to mitigate issues in the process.

In this blog post, we’ll walk through detailed steps on how to configure Work Order Insights within AWS Supply Chain to stay informed about potential work order delays and receive risk mitigation recommendations to stay on track.

Configuring work order insights within AWS Supply Chain

Work Order Insights is quickly deployed and configures according to your organization’s processes. It does not require replatforming, upfront licensing costs or long-term contracts and comes with AWS advantages in security, reliability, scalability, and elasticity.

Work order processes are the key area of setup to ensure you are getting meaningful data out of Work Order Insights. AWS Supply Chain recognizes processes defined within your data and present them for configuration in a clear and easy way. If preferred, processes can be manually created within the application.

Prerequisites

For this blog post, it is assumed that you understand the use of the mentioned services and you have the following prerequisites:

1. You have an Amazon Web Services. Inc. (AWS) account. If you don’t have an account, you can follow the step-by-step instructions provided in the account activation guide.
2. You will also need an AWS Supply Chain account. If you’re not already a customer, visit the AWS Supply Chain website for more information and to sign-up.

You will start on the main setup/configuration screen as shown below. Select the process you would like to configure, or select Create Process to manually create a new process.

Enter the Process Name and Optional Site Identifier on the next page if a process is site-specific. The process builder can be used to expand other milestones and details that need to be tracked.

Next you will need to add milestones. Milestones are the steps that a work order process goes through to designate process start and completion. They can also be used to identify when a process is blocked, or if a follow-up action is needed. Milestones leverage transactional data to define success criteria and advance work orders through the process steps. You can progressively add steps as they begin to build out the workflow for tracking various milestones along the way.

You will then configure the Milestone Rules once milestones have been defined. These milestone rules will determine when a milestone occurs within the defined process.

The milestone rules will also identify the Completion Criteria for each step. You can click the Save and Exit button to complete the setup process once the details are entered and verified.

You can view all the work orders that are late, on time, at-risk, watch, or delivered, and can expand the work order to view the required materials on Work Order Insights dashboard.

You can filter work orders by a variety of areas including Location, Work Center, Resources, and Status: On Time, Watch, At Risk, Late, and Delivered, and can search by work order or material, or utilize Sort and Column Visibility options to further customize their view.

You can review the more specific details on the procurement status for all the items ordered as part of a work order, and can use the filters to view a subset of procurement processes.

You can also see all transfer activity for parts requested as part of the work order, and can easily filter for specific views of the corresponding material summary. The information provided on the Work Orders, Procurement, and Logistics tab provides better work order visibility including insights that that can be used to proactively develop response and mitigation strategies in case a potential supply chain risk arises.

Conclusion

Work Order Insights enables organizations enables improved visibility of potential delivery delays and risks through proactive monitoring, completion date forecasts, and insightful analytics. By configuring work order processes specific to their operations, you can track material progression from purchasing through final delivery. It also empowers teams to take timely actions and implement mitigation strategies.

It also introduces a shift from reactive to proactive decision-making, optimizing asset utilization and driving operational excellence. The comprehensive work order material status view provides seamless deployment, configuration flexibility, trusted security, and scalability to eliminate operational visibility gaps and mitigate operational risks. You can adopt this capability to streamline work order execution, reduce material expedites and inventory buffers, improve collaboration, and maximize operational efficiency.

Getting started with AWS Supply Chain is simple and doesn’t require any upfront licensing fees or long-term commitments. Begin your journey with the following three steps:

1. Learn about AWS Supply Chain: Visit the AWS Supply Chain website to understand the product’s features and capabilities.
2. Get a technical overview: Explore the AWS Workshop Studio for a self-paced technical walkthrough. You’ll learn how to create an instance, ingest data, navigate the user interface, create insights, and generate demand plans.
3. Start using AWS Supply Chain: Once you’re ready, access the AWS Console and begin streamlining your supply chain operations with AWS Supply Chain’s efficient, data-driven management tools. You can also access the user guide for detailed setup instructions and additional guidance.