Feeling Constrained by Inadequate Supply and Capacity Planning?

Effectively aligning supply to demand has always been a challenge, but it has become an order of magnitude more difficult in recent years. For many, global supply is often constrained and consequently, accessing and determining how to allocate that scarce supply has become a critical business challenge.

Problem

Most existing systems and processes cannot effectively plan supply or manage capacity on a global basis — there are too many nodes in the supply chain, too many silos of information, and too many disparate systems involved in planning, executing, and monitoring the supply chain. The level of information required to accurately model the business is massive — it also changes constantly.

Without the right tools, there is a heavy reliance on manual efforts to plan supply and mitigate supply chain risks, often leading to slow response times and less than ideal decisions.

Need

To operate effectively and profitably in this reality, global manufacturers must have an ability to perform supply and capacity planning, as well as to manage capacity constraints at the global, aggregated level, while seamlessly transitioning to lower levels of granularity across:

Geographies: from global, to region, to supply chain node
Time scales: from quarters, to months, to weeks to days
Products: from product family, to product, to part SKU

And while there must be a regular planning cadence, typically monthly, the planning process must also support real-time response to address misalignments in the demand and supply balance.

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Solution

Core to RapidResponse® are supply and capacity planning capabilities that support planning on a global basis, in one system, across the planning horizon and inclusive of external trading partners.

With a control tower solution, global capacity planning and supply and capacity management are performed in the same system that manages connected functions such as sales and operations planning (S&OP), master production scheduling (MPS), material planning, and supplier scheduling, so all levels of planning respect and incorporate the capacity constraints of the supply chain.

RapidResponse provides:

A global view of supply and capacity across multiple tiers, including identification of material and capacity constraints at any level of the bill of material (BOM)
Robust capacity and constraint planning that enables businesses to quickly understand production issues, available-to-promise data, and expected delivery performance
Complete visibility to global demand, with an ability to aggregate and disaggregate at will, allowing "what-if" analysis of the impact of demand changes on capacity, and conversely, the impact of supply shortages and other capacity constraints on customer demand
Visibility into and coordination of supplier / external capacities
Capacity management at the operational level, adjusting and rebalancing in real-time as a result of underloads or overloads
Ability to constraint production planning to what can actually be produced, resulting in a plan that reflects the reality of your supply chain.

Benefits

Faster and more accurate plan development, reconciled with supply chain constraints
Early identification of capacity bottlenecks and the operational and financial impact of demand and supply misalignments
Intelligent tradeoffs between supply, demand and inventory risks
More responsive and profitable supply chain operations overall