Supply Planning

Supply comes in many forms; from production, from the supplier, and from co-packers. We plan supply for every hour, every day, every week, once a month or once a quarter/year.

The complexity for supply comes in the variety of it, supply or purchase of Raw Materials is something completely different than the production of Finished Goods. The supply plan is driven by a set of parameters including the minimum amount, fixed multiple, maximum amount, maximum interval, days cover and various time shifts between the different states of the product. Available capacity can be included as a constraint leading to preproduction within the constraint of shelf life.
A multi-layered network of supply (aka replenishment) proposals is calculated real time and the user can adjust proposals with immediate visual feedback on the consequences. The calculation will take the warehouse lots, work in progress and confirmed orders as input and observe shelf life constraints in supply chains with perishable goods. Existing inventory and projected inventory is handled on a FEFO (first expire first out) basis. Products may need to ripen or mature or grow in industries such as wine, cheese, and seeds. The system observes the complete lifecycle from ordering to expiring.

Capacity is always in short supply. What inventory plan best copes with this limit?

Conflicting constraints are part of daily life. In a nutshell, if capacity is short, the options are to supply earlier at the expense of inventory carrying costs and or shelf life issues or supply from another source which may be more expensive. Any mix of these options that maximizes the product availability in the marketplace can be considered. Different demand is competing for the same capacity. Outperform planning handles such conflicting constraints and pushes for the optimal plan.

The manufacturing schedule connects the Sales & Operations Planning cycle to execution and vice-versa.

Many companies manage the detailed schedule in correlation with the production floor but with insufficient linkage to the Rough Cut Capacity Plan and Sales & Operations plan that drives the business on the medium term.
Outperform treats Scheduling as an integral part of the Planning process. Several schedulers can work together in the multi-user environment and can see the consequences of each another’s decisions on the resources and product inventories that are common. A schedule is the result of complex calculations and user input. The user interface brings the complexity to you in a way you can understand it allowing you to add or suppress details as required. Interacting with the batches provides immediate feedback on the consequences in the related areas.

“What if” analysis is a common theme at all businesses. Outperform enables Scenario Planning in a simple and easy way.

After setting up a state of the art supply chain planning system for operational planning, most companies go back to EXCEL® to do their scenario planning due to the difficulty in setting up a master and transactional data to support a scenario. This limits also the number of scenarios that could be created due to the laborious nature of creating data to support a scenario.
Outperform Planning comes with a built-in scenario capability that speeds up the generation of scenario data, along with the ability to refresh the same from your production environment when required. Having the ability to create these scenario environments allow the planners to keep the strategic planning scenarios independent of the regular production environment. Added with the ability to compare the plans generated from the scenarios along with the regular production plan, it allows quantifying the pros and cons of the same. With less time spent on creating the scenario environment, more time is available to analyze the results of the scenario plan.