The HotLine Part Request Tracker creates a direct mobile hotline from a customer (consumer) back to the vendor (supplier) and can be used to keep just in time, lean, operations flowing as smoothly as possible in the face of inevitable exceptions.

Given the level of efficiency and reliability expected in business these days, minutes matter, and while your organization undoubtedly has lean processes and systems in place to deal with the resolution of these issues, they are often legacy systems that are slow and encumbered with bureaucratic overhead.  Turnaround in such systems is often unacceptable; therefore, many companies are taking a much more direct “hot line” approach.

Often, out of frustration with the existing process and system, you email or just pick up the phone and call the supplier, but email or verbal interactions are not easily tracked and definitely do not lend themselves to later analysis.  This is where HotLine comes in. The HotLine solution permits direct supplier to consumer notification of a parts request in a track-able fashion, providing immediate status updates via email and optionally SMS messages.  It makes it easy to sound the alarm, and ensures it is heard by leveraging the mobile devices everyone carries, nowadays. And later, the requests have been fully tracked and can be reported on and analyzed.

HotLine leads to quicker resolution of exceptions when they occur, here’s how:

1. Unexpected issue occurs—a part is not available locally, but should be–the manufacturing process stops–EMERGENCY!
2. Part consumer enters request via mobile device or web page.  For example, customer enters a part number and a description of the issue, and indicates the level of urgency (e.g. Line Down).
3. Part Supplier is immediately notified on mobile device and via email, supplier responds indicating ETA/Status
4. Consumer notified of the initial supplier response.
5. Supplier expedites delivery of the part then updates status to indicate the request has been processed from the vendor standpoint.
6. Consumer notified on mobile device and by email that the request has been processed.
7. Once part is received, Consumer updates status to mark the part is received.  Alternatively, consumer signals that it is not resolved, triggering step 3, again.
8. As part of marking the request resolved, root cause data is collected for analysis
9. Issue resolved.

HotLine is secure, both consumer and suppliers must login to access the data.

The request history is kept in the database and is available for later analysis.

Statistics and reports can be generated to track request frequency,  by severity, by time to resolve, by part.

HotLine runs on premise or in the cloud–most customers opt for cloud deployment.