Finning Canada
Finning parts supply chain team who led the turnaround. L-R: Omar Nef, Brett Knutson, Yogi Suryawanshi, Pavan Pappu, Michael Fradgley, Caryn Christensen
when Caterpillar began phasing out its own dealer busi-
ness system (DBS) a few years earlier.
Developed by an independent third party, the new
ERP system was supposed to be an improvement over its
DBS predecessor and deliver improved performance lev-
els across the company. However, Finning experienced a
number of implementation issues soon after the system
went live, not the least of which was a spare parts port-
folio that had more than 400,000 unique stock-keeping
unit codes.
The company’s physical supply chain soon became out
of sync with its transactional supply chain. As a result,
freight costs, emergency shipping costs and excess inven-
tory expenses escalated to all-time highs. Once ranked
among the top five Caterpillar dealers in North America,
Finning Canada dropped to the bottom of 55 North
American dealerships.
Suryawanshi was hired in July 2013 to help turn
around the company’s supply chain performance. The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology grad had plen-
ty of previous experience with helping businesses adopt
supply chain best practices. He spent several years with
PricewaterhouseCoopers and Accenture Management
Consulting in Calgary prior to joining Edmonton-based
22 • SUPPLYCHAINCANADA.CA • SCMA
Finning and had turned around the fortunes of several
North American companies before that.
One of the first steps he took after joining Finning was
to order a review of the company’s entire operation, from
structures to systems to people.
“We pretty much did a 360 review of everything, all the
way from the front end of the supply chain, which is re-
ally forecasting, to purchasing to contract management
to warehousing, distribution, transportation and the ERP
system,” he says.
The review took about six weeks to compete and re-
vealed the company’s problems were far more deeply
rooted than originally thought. As with any business that’s
been around for 80 years, complacency had crept into sev-
eral key areas of operation.
“The benefit I had was that I had a fresh set of eyes. I
was an outsider. That helped me to really look at the prob-
lematic areas and come up with a benchmark of what it
should look like,” he says.
The review provided the company with a road map of
where it needed to go and led to Finning’s management
team implementing 50 optimization initiatives that fo-
cused on inventory, supply chain analytics and technology
enhancements.