products RapidResponse for Manufacturing

Response Drives Inventory Reductions and Operations Performance Across A Global Supply Chain

For years companies have invested in solutions to drive down inventory in the hopes of improving operations performance across a global supply chain. Yet, inventory remains stubbornly high. The reason? Manufacturers have never solved the fundamental challenge of dealing with the business when it doesn't run like clockwork.

Manufacturers today are facing escalating demands from their customers for last-minute flexibility within an increasingly complex global supply chain. Poor visibility into production and labor issues compound these challenges and often lead to expensive inventory policies. The difficulty of merging all these variables into a single cohesive response often prevents managers from realizing the full impact of decisions before they are made. Constant changes in supply, demand and products are difficult to manage, impossible to predict, and can trigger a steady erosion of margins and market share. But with RapidResponse for Manufacturing, manufacturers can quickly make informed, best-practice decisions and manage these situations as they happen.
Customer Sound Bite"Just to elaborate a little more on the speed that RapidResponse™ brings our organization as far as understanding a demand change in our environment, it's as quick as a planner logging in to RapidResponse, creating what's called a private plan; opening up a workbook developed specifically for Clear to Build analysis, loading a couple of changes, committing that change, and then instantly the data comes back with the net result of that change. In our past environment that could take 2 to 3 days. In our current RapidResponse environment that could literally take second to minutes."
Tom Rossi — MC Assembly ( video)

“Visibility by itself it has limited value. Visibility must have context. Ventana Research asserts that applications that offer visibility must also provide analytical capabilities for decision support and the means by which people can work together to reach decisions and implement actions.”

Robert D. Kugel, Ventana Research, "The Value of Visibility" (January, 2006)

Response Management Empowers People to Drive Operations Performance

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse for Manufacturing is an on-demand Response Management service that empowers supply chain decision makers to quickly sense supply and demand misalignments and drive more profitable responses by adjusting supply plans in response to daily changes in demand, supply and product inside the sales and operations planning (S&OP) horizon. With RapidResponse for Manufacturing, action teams utilize personal alerting, multi-enterprise visibility, collaborative "what-if" analysis and rapid decision support to achieve cost reductions and breakthrough operating performance.

RapidResponse for Manufacturing empowers master schedulers, planners, buyers and outsourcing managers with tools to:

• Prioritize activities and drive rapid action through proactive, exception-based alerts
• Deliver accurate, global insight of business realities to all stakeholders
• Quickly resolve demand and component supply misalignments
• Proactively manage inventory exposure

When combined with RapidResponse for Demand Management, the integrated end-to-end RapidResponse service provides supply chain teams the tools for risk tradeoff and response from the customer down to the product component level.

Make Informed, Best-Practice Decisions

Using a single decision-making tool rather than a variety of custom developed, high maintenance point solutions or traditional supply chain planning systems, RapidResponse for Manufacturing provides supply chain visibility and supply chain agility to rapidly evaluate the impact of unexpected changes on all aspects of the business to quickly make informed, best-practice decisions.

“The real-time information analytics and the simulation capabilities of the RapidResponse solution empower everyone in the organization to make better decisions.”

Robert Reinckens, vice president and chief information officer-Americas, Coty Inc.

To learn how RapidResponse for Manufacturing can help you reduce inventory and achieve superior operations performance download the datasheet.