Supply Chain Solutions
SC management methodology delivers integrated solutions to all critical business processes constituting the core of a company's operations:
- Demand management This sub-process is the operational management of demand information for planning purposes. The objective of the demand management process is to provide fast, accurate, and reliable delivery-date responses to customer orders as well as to understand the customer's buying patterns and develop aggregate, collaborative forecasts. Demand management is a sub-process that includes order capturing, customer verification, order promising, backlog management, and order fulfillment. The issue is not just forecasts, but how to generate forecasts, manage them and constantly reconcile new information with current forecasts, updating them on an as needed basis.
- Supply and distribution planning The objective of this sub-process is to optimally position enterprise resources to meet demand. Strategic planning, inventory planning, distribution planning, collaborative procurement & transportation planning, and supply allocation are all part of this sub-process.
- Production planning This sub-process ensures sufficient production capacity, raw materials and personnel are available to meet demand. It optimizes supply chain throughput and synchronizes production, material, and distribution resources on demand to generate a constraint-based plan.
- Production scheduling This sub-process determines what should be made, when, how much and on what production units. The scheduling systems improve both processes and inventory management. Driven by cost-based analysis, these systems determine the best production run sequences in order to balance the tradeoffs between customer demand and production efficiencies. They reduce variability in operations and predict future operational problems.
- Available-to-Promise (ATP) This sub-process is a mechanism supporting automatic commitments to most customer requests for products by looking for projected inventory and unallocated production capacity. The intelligent ATP process not only assesses and changes inventory levels, but also feasibly modifies production schedules in order to find the best solution to satisfy customer requests.
Some Benefit Areas from deployment of Supply Chain Management Applications:
- Reduction in Inventory and Working Capital Having the Right Product in the Right Place at the Right Time - reduction of missed orders, back orders and misplaced inventory
- Reduction in time and skill required to generate and update production plans and schedules
- Continuous synchronizing of manufacturing and distribution activities;
- Ability to quickly change your plan due to a contingency situation, e.g., a production line is unavailable for a week. How can the manufacturing resources be reallocated to meet all of the deadlines for deliveries to the customers?
- Improved scheduling of transportation logistics with resultant cost savings;
- Improved on-time delivery and subsequent customer satisfaction;
- Reduced finished products inventories. Build to order, not build to stock;
- More rapid turns for reduced raw material inventories.
- Decreased number of changeovers to reduce production cost.
The best-in-class companies' supply chain process is continually redesigned to ensure that it is configured to optimal performance
