APICS Honors Leaders in Operations Management

Winners of the APICS 2006 Corporate Awards of Excellence Award include Mother Parkers Tea and Coffee and Supply Chain Consultants in the “technology partnership” category, Infosys Technologies Ltd. in the “education” category, and TIBCO Companies in the “innovation” category. The annual awards recognize companies for their contributions and performance excellence in the field of operations management.
Mother Parkers Tea and Coffee, Inc., of Mississauga, Ont., Canada, and Supply Chain Consultants, of Wilmington, Del., worked together to develop and implement a scheduling system that optimized the company's packaging lines to more efficiently schedule the grinder and roaster facilities. Changes in customer demands, marketing programs, and last-minute orders made forecasting and scheduling a constant challenge for Mother Parkers' manufacturing plants. Supply Chain Consultants (SCC) developed unique algorithms that improved the schedules and efficiencies in the Mother Parkers grinding, blending, and packing lines that resulted in 100% forecast accuracy. The company has also seen a 20-point improvement in schedule attainment and improvement in scheduling capability.
Infosys Technologies Ltd. of Fremont, Calif., adopted the APICS “body of knowledge” in the development of competencies for its employees working in supply chain management, manufacturing planning, control and execution. The consulting and IT services company conducted in-house training for its employees and offered paid leave to candidates taking certification exams. For overseas employees, Infosys arranged for 30 hours of in-house workshops at multiple locations to train employees in the APICS program. Additionally, dedicated teams from locations worldwide coordinate training and registration for APICS certification, and the progress of training and certification are tracked at the corporate level. To date more than 90 Infosys employees have completed the APICS Basics of Supply Chain Management course.
TIBCO of Palo Alto, Calif., addresses information management challenges with its Collaborative Information Manager (CIM) which aligns enterprise master data across multiple business units, departments, and partners and synchronizes that information with downstream information technology (IT) transactional systems. TIBCO's CIM accelerates time-to-market through automation, increases revenues with cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, provides visibility and control of business activities, increases customer satisfaction, and reduces shipment inaccuracies and invoice errors.
APICS is an operations management association based Alexandria, Va. The award winners were recognized at organization's annual conference recently held in Orlando.