eChain Assessment Options

Business Viability Assessment - determines the likelihood of a business succeeding, given assumptions regarding its existing and projected capital structure. Through the identification of benchmarks, the viability of a business’s market, management, finance and overall business model is measuralbe. The complexity of the assessment is dependent on the size and scope of the business model. A Business Viability Assessment will vary from company to company and from industry to industry.

Drawing from our breadth of experience, the professionals of eChain Technology are able to rapidly identify an underperforming company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The business viability assessment provides lenders and creditors with the information necessary to understand the position of a company, along with recommendations regarding options to minimize risk or maximize recovery.

Operations Assessment - Methodical and recursive approach that quickly identifies your performance pain points, focuses intense analysis to determine root cause, and then quantifies opportunities for improvement by applying best-practice what-if historic scenario recreations. The Assessment deliverable is an exceptionally documented report of your current performance, areas in need of improvement, benchmarks, and specific ranked steps and activities needed to resolve your key problem areas, improve performance and generate a multi-million dollar ROI.

Solutions Assessment - The process of ensuring that the solution best matches the requirements. Solution Assessment includes a preliminary exercise to elicit requirements from key business stakeholders. Once requirements are handed to the solutions team the business analyst will be expected to assess the design returned to the project team. The Business analyst maintains much of the project's intelectual property - especially about requirements and is the most able person to assess the apropiateness of the solution design in terms of alignment, quality and value.

Project Assessment - Despite your best efforts, projects will sometimes flounder, and even fail. The Troubled Project Assessment will help you to read the warning signs and take corrective actions. We will evaluate troubled projects, identify possible recovery measures, analyze cancellation impact, and document related conclusions and recommendations.

Expected Benefits

Improve Service Levels - Missing sales due to out of stock products can result in permanently reduced shelf space and reduced sales for the next calendar year. Dropping service levels is a result of many easily corrected supply-chain and operational issues. eChain will determine the root cause of your decreased service levels and propose ways to affordably increase your service levels and product availability.

Reduce Transportation Costs - With fuel at a record price, transportation costs are increasing significantly. It is no longer acceptable to expedite significant quantities of products, nor to ship partially loaded trucks. eChain can show you ways to improve planning that will reduce your expedited shipping costs, and how to reduce transportation spend by more efficiently planning transportation and cubing out your shipments.

Improved Inventory Turns - Better forecasting, reduced product acquisition time, SKU Rationalization, and finely-tuned safety stock calculations will allow you to improve your inventory turns significantly. Improved inventory turns directly result in higher profits. We will benchmark every component of your inventory turns and drive the necessary improvements to increase your turns by 1 to 3 times on average. Increase SKU profitability - Revisiting your ABC analysis and SKU Rationalization can result in improved availability of core products. We can show you the relationship between core product and loss leader sales and highly profitable product sales to fine-tune your on-shelf product mix to maximize your product revenues.

Consolidate Warehousing and Storage - Improved Forecasting, SKU Rationalization, and lean processes often results in improved service levels and decreased stocking requirements. Less on-hand inventory and a fine-tuned distribution network can result in fewer warehouses and DC's. We can determine and define the strategy to decrease your warehouse and excess inventory spend.

Decrease Product Cost - Better planning and collaboration between you, your vendors and your customers through approaches like Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and Collaborative Planning Forecasting Replenishment (CPFR) can result in less chaotic and sporadic ordering and better planning across your entire distributed network. Better planning and visibility is typically rewarded with better purchasing terms and prices, and less returns.