Solution Principles
- Right balance of standardization and customization for low maintenance cost.
- Scale-able Solution for the ease of roll-outs.
- Solution with flexibility in mind.
- SAP and Industry best practices.
Demand Planning
"Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will"
At Eternum, we see that demand planning is more than application of statistical Forecasting. The design of system and process to enable forecast with higher accuracy. Typical variables that have greater influence on out come are:
- Appropriate characteristic level for forecasting – product family, Brand or SKU?
- Impact of impending campaigns or promotions – FMCG, utilities or Fashion?
- Confluence of bottom-up and top-down planning – sales vs marketing?
Distribution Planning
"Leaders win through logistics challenge of right place and right time is an ever changing and evolving due to innumerable variables and growing business." - Tom Peters
As the quote suggests, these challenges are translated into the system variables for process control and ability of solution to quickly respond to changes.
Typical solution approach to process design for distribution planning ideally incorporates.
- Network Inventory versus service levels
- Synchronization with production planning
- Product obsolescence and substitution in the distribution network
- Planning with distribution constraints like lot sizes, lead times, capacities etc.
- Stock norms based on costs, forecast and lead time variability
- Stocking strategies – stock plant vs stock at DC
Production planning
"A good plan violently executed now is better than perfect plan executed next week " - George S Patton
Demand plans and distribution plans provide ground work for production planning. This stage poses new set of challenges. All inaccuracies start manifesting at this stage, be it invalid order dates, inaccurate capacities and wrong definitions of set up times, changeover times or manufacturing lead times. These variables matter in creating valid scheduling and production plan.
- Discrete or repetitive manufacturing
- Minimization of change over vs Customer Order fulfillment
- Multi-level bottleneck resources
- Supplier’s capacity constraints
- Lot size constraints
- Process flexibility to change the plan
- Conflicting objectives – Product prioritization vs Order Prioritization
Procurement planning
"One persons lack of planning always becomes someone else's emergency"
Procurement moves beyond the boundries of organization requiring consideration of external variables
- Advance visibility into the requirement
- Make v/s Buy Decisions
- Conflicting objectives of EOQ vs MOQ
- Just-in-Time(JIT) reports
- Level of information collaboration with suppliers
- Consideration of supplier capacities
- Consideration of supplier’s lead time variability
- Preferred suppliers and quotas
- Bulk Procurement
Order Promising
"We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called to perform what we cannot" - Abraham Linclon
In most of the business scenarios, order promising reflects most demanding part – ability to promise a date to customer. Order promising reflects the reliability of complete supply chain, from Demand Planing, Production Scheduling to Procurement.
At Eternum, we have experience and knowledge of complex scenarios in design for order promising. Process design from substitution, back orders, allocations and scheduling.
- Multiple order prioritization criteria
- Comprehensive order cut reports
- Dynamic commitment to high priority order from low priority orders
- Order consolidation to leverage economies of transportation
- Operational daily material wise shortage report.
Integrated Business Planning
"If everyone moves forward together, success takes care of itself" - Henry Ford
The process outcome of IBP is a true business plan, rather than a only demand plan, supply plan, production plan or a financial budget. Through IBP business connects corporate performance management, financial planning processes, and operational planning systems. This holistic business plan increases business alignment through the sharing of performance strategies and helps quantify business risk so enterprises can rapidly adapt to meet challenges.
We at Eternum, have geared up for the new technology and process understanding with our consultants engaged in proof of concepts and fitment / integration consulting assignments