Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
AUGUST 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 47 tant, which did not work out either. Finally, we hired our own people who understood Oracle, and now we have a team of four peo- ple running our Oracle system. They're the ones who upgrade and run the Oracle sys- tem. It was a huge task, but it has paid off. Today, if the ERP system is shut down, our factories shut down entirely. Matties: When you say it has paid off, going from the manual to this new system, you recouped a lot of human hours. Ghalili: Yes. The reality is also we would not be able to manually run what we are running today. We have close to 4,500 different compo- nents. Because we are mid-volume, large mix, and quick turn, there is no way that a human being could sit and manage all of that. It was more a function of survival that we had to go to an electronic system, not so much a function of cost. Without that, we were not able to do it. Matties: That being said, there was a financial result in cash flow because now your inven- tory is much more balanced to what the fore- cast of workload is. Ghalili: The inventory is much more balanced. It's challenging with customers who have high expectations with almost zero forecasts. We deal with customers who give us a 4-week lead time, while some of the raw materials are 8–12 weeks. There's a lot of playing around and juggling the ball, as they say. How much do we buy at risk? Inventory is a major chal- lenge because of not having a clear forecast. But if we did not have an electronic system, I don't think we could survive or maintain an inventory. Right now, we're running about $2.5 million in inventory. If I had to run this order manually, we would have to maintain about $10 million in inventory just to be able to feed exactly what we're doing today. It's a major differential. Epoch International's inventory storage and management equipment saves both labor and inventory cost.