Turning supply-chain delays into one clear decision.
Inside a $220M automotive parts manufacturer with more than 60,000 SKUs, a late order isn’t one problem. It’s a dozen possible ones spread across five systems. Annona connected to their ERP read-only and traced a stalled order to its true root blocker in seconds. Here’s how.
A national automotive parts manufacturer & distributor.
Manufactures and distributes vehicle components to national automotive retail chains, with offshore production and a deep, multi-level bill of materials. Their stack is capable: a tier-one ERP with a warehouse module, plus a BI platform. Yet delay diagnosis still depended on people manually stitching exports together.
Not short on effort. Short on visibility.
Teams worked hard across planning, purchasing, production, warehousing and customer service. Yet late orders kept rising, because the critical information sat in different places and arrived at different times. A delayed shipment is rarely one thing. It’s a symptom: a component unavailable, stock reserved for another commitment, material physically present but not yet usable, incoming supply misaligned to demand, or planning assumptions disconnected from reality.
Most organisations can see part of that picture. Almost none can see all of it in one place. That gap creates uncertainty, repeated follow-up, and slow decisions, every function working from its own version of the truth.
“The order is late” is a question, not an answer. Leadership needed three answers fast: can we fulfil demand with what we have now; if not, what exactly is blocking us; and what’s the commercial impact if we don’t act.
One diagnostic, run to the root.
Rather than another dashboard, Annona ran a guided diagnostic on a real backordered line. Every step showed its reasoning. Here is that exact run, anonymised:
From a morning of cross-checking to a five-line decision.
The same diagnostic produced 2 outputs from a single run: an executive summary for leadership and customer-risk reviews, and an operational workbook with the order-level and component-level detail planners need to act. Both groups working from identical facts.
across 5–6 BOM levels, from a “not buildable” flag
5 sales orders, one distributor
WO-8451, 111 of 112 units
Business-case metrics, measured over the 6-week pilot
These outcomes are baselined at the start of the engagement and reported at week six. Figures are published here on completion.
Immediate wins that harden into operating discipline.
First weeks
- Faster diagnosis of shortage events
- Clearer prioritisation of corrective action
- Tighter planning–purchasing coordination
- Customer-impact risk communicated early
As it becomes routine
- Reduced backorder aging
- More predictable fulfilment planning
- Fewer fire-drill escalations
- Stronger confidence in weekly decisions
At leadership level
- Stronger operating discipline
- More reliable service commitments
- Visibility into structural bottlenecks
- Clear accountability for action
Based on a real Annona pilot engagement. Part numbers, locations, customers and suppliers anonymised; figures reflect the actual analysis produced. Quantified business-case metrics populate at pilot completion.