Production - Inventory Planning 

This particular policy described the various management reports required of the system. The following list includes the report descriptions that are significant to the PSI process:

This report represents a final summation of product family forecasts from Sales, coupled with the production plan structured to support that need and includes the resultant inventory trends that are a function of The Plan. This report takes less than four hours per month for the Executive Committee to review its instrument business relative to budget, plan, and financial impact.

A summary report that provides unique manufacturing information that arms manufacturing management with the ability to see the demands placed on its capacity to support the plan. This information is furnished in product family array and provides insight into manufacturing backlogs where they are not producing at a rate that Sales would like, as well as over production potential, when the capacity exceeds the demand. With this report, Manufacturing is able to adjust capacities in accordance with requirements.

This report provides similar information to the Sales organization, so that they might be able to ascertain the pluses and minuses of The Plan as it exists.

This report takes the unit documentation that represents the above reports and converts it into financial information at standard cost so that budget planning can be addressed.

Worksheets are the foundation of the entire system. Each worksheet is at the end item level. In other words, every member of the product family has an individual worksheet that describes the history, the present, and the future of that particular product. When questions arise at the executive summary level that address a specific product or product family, it is easy to look into the worksheets to provide specific information where required. This implementation experience has shown very few instances where worksheets are needed at the executive approval session.

Coulter has, over a period of years, made the PSI process an integral part of their normal business activity. The senior executives of the corporation come together on a monthly basis to review the plans that have been produced and take their rightful place as those who must make the decisions about what will be produced based on what we plan to sell. They are able to take confidence in this data,due to the creation of an environment where data input schedules are considered sacred; the integrity of the data is an accountability of each data source. They have had the foresight to provide no alternatives to this planning pro­cess. There is no other method whereby products are planned for production within Coulter's Instrument Op­erations.