Kubota manufactures commercial-grade tractors and riding mowers, which are sold in North America and exported to Europe. The company's mainframe-based ERP system directs all phases of the manufacturing process. Because Kubota's manufacturing operation depends on more than 250 suppliers, the company's material requirements, which often change, needed to be more tightly integrated with the suppliers' production planning systems. To achieve the required integration, Kubota needed to find a way to let supplier partners view and respond to Kubota's material requirements in real time.

To meet that business requirement, B2B Technologies built and deployed Kubota SupplierLink II, a system which shares, in real time, the schedules created by Kubota's ERP system with its suppliers. SupplierLink II flags Kubota's schedule changes for suppliers and enables suppliers to respond to these changes quickly and efficiently.

SupplierLink II automates the majority of Kubota's interactions with its suppliers, minimizing the need for human intervention. For example, the system's exception-based workflow architecture retains open action items in a queue, ensuring that these items, not those already handled, come to the attention of the appropriate supplier or purchasing agent.

SupplierLink II also prints bar-coded packing lists at each supplier site to help ensure accurate receiving at Kubota. Because these documents accompany the shipment, Kubota can scan the packing list on the dock, eliminating the manual reentry of shipping information, which can lead to errors and miscommunication. As a result, suppliers can use SupplierLink II to immediately address any discrepancies. Because SupplierLink II works in concert with Kubota's paperless AutoPay system, account reconciliations happen on-line and suppliers always know how much they'll be paid.

SupplierLink II achieved measurable improvements in Kubota's suppliers' key processes, including:

• Sharing of Kubota's more stable schedules produced a 99% reduction in suppliers' overdue orders.
• Adding efficiencies to supplier operations netted a 25% reduction in supplier-required lead times.
• Streamlined, paperless operations enabled a 20% reduction in operational staff time needed to oversee material requisitioning and fulfillment.

In addition to the benefits suppliers gained from SupplierLink II, additional advantages from the system accrued to Kubota itself, including:

• Bar-coded packing lists enable Kubota to receive an entire truckload of parts in one quick scan, which produced a 78% improvement in order accuracy and a 96% savings in the labor needed to reconcile ordered and received quantities.
• The system's workflow architecture ensures that all open items are flagged and remain in a queue until resolved by Kubota or the appropriate supplier.
• Emergency orders for parts are available on SupplierLink II, and the appropriate supplier can use that information to ship the part and its bar-coded packing list within two minutes of the order appearing on the system.