In today’s precarious business economy, many companies are experiencing flat, soft, or in many cases negative sales growth while still having the fixed, and to some degree, variable cost structures associated with the more profitable yesteryears. 

Facing this type of balance sheet, many companies have turned their collective attention to the task of identifying operational efficiencies, or as one client put it “looking for the hidden money lost in the sofa”.  The supply chain is a natural place to start looking “under the sofa cushions” due to its history of disparate executional applications in the areas of:  order management, procurement, inbound order planning and execution, warehousing, order fulfillment, outbound loading, route scheduling, and proof of delivery.  These companies are saying “I expect my supply chain to operate in this coordinated fashion, and when it varies from our plan in terms of time, quantity, cost or other expectations, I want to be alerted and I want each occurrence to be tracked and trended”.

This is the role of Blue Sky Technologies.  Our software applications are connected real-time to a company’s supply chain executional and planning systems much like the dashboard in a car is attached to the various operating components of the car.  When operational expectations vary outside of company configured complex event tolerance levels, we alert, track, trend and analyze the exceptions so that companies know exactly where to focus their efforts.  We also assign cost factors to each of the events making the cost savings for eliminating the exceptions extremely obvious.  Using our applications, companies have been able to:  add multiple percentage points to their service level or perfect order scoring, (5% in one case), increase their overall throughput and space utilization, decrease their associated labor expenditure and overtime, compare multiple disparate facilities using one common set of metrics for the enterprise, and decrease their overall cost of goods sold by as much as 4-8%.  This also positions companies to be much more lean and responsive during this economy, which in turn, prepares them to be highly profitable when the current economy improves.