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Over the last two years, I actively engaged technologists and business leaders to redefine demandplanning. In the industry, supply-centric techniques reign with lots of bravado and messaging on control towers, Demand-driven Materials Requirements Planning (DDMRP), and generative AI. Or planned orders to purchase orders?)
Advanced supply chain planning software leverages these probability distributions to optimize inventory targets, balancing service levels against carrying costs with mathematical precision. However, this approach ignores real purchasing behavior, such as customers buying complete sets of four tires. The result?
Each executive has a different perspective on the definition of supply chain excellence, but they are never discussed and aligned. His organization purchased an advanced planning technology from well-known best of breed provider, and the implementation should have been successful, but it was not. What Is The Ring of Fire?
During the 1980s, I was on a management team for a large manufacturer. The Company was attempting to gain economies of scale by grouping manufacturing technologies within a common infrastructure to reap the benefits of a co-generation facility, a centralized warehouse, and a talented administrative team. Lack of executive buy-in.
The Failure of Existing DemandPlanning Solutions. During the pandemic, supply chain leaders turned off their demandplanning solutions. Re-implement demandplanning, trade promotion management, and revenue/price management together to improve the baseline demand signal. Lessons Learned. The reason?
Today, I speak at the North American Manufacturing Association, Manufacturing Leadership Conference, in Nashville on the use of data to improve supply chain resilience. Interestingly, in Q3 2023, 38% of manufacturers, distributors and retailers missed their target for revenue guidance for the quarter. The result was restatement.
The group needed a clear market signal on consumption patterns and the translation of demand with minimal latency to optimize price, mix, and schedule the factory to manage margin. Consumers constantly change the mix preferences in purchases. Somedays, the focus is on steaks or ribs and the next on the purchase of ground or cubed meat.
In May 2025, one in seven home-purchase agreements fell through resulting in the cancellation of 56,000 purchase contracts. Ask a procurement or transportation professional if they have a good demand signal and expect a laugh. The goal should not be making today’s planning processes faster and hands-free.
Integrated Planning: Tight Coupling of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Supply Chain Planning (SCP). When companies tell me that they need to exchange their current Supply Chain Planning (SCP) from a best-of-breed provider to get a leg-up, I ask, “Why?” Demandplanning is less industry specific than supply.
At the end of a long day of a strategy session on supply chain excellence with a client, I needed to fill up some time in an agenda. The genesis of the River of Demand learning activity. Over the last decade, I find fewer and fewer companies understand supply chain planning. The result? Background. The takeaway?
Pirelli needed to move from using an army of representatives visiting dealer sites, showing them massive catalogs, and saying to the dealer, “You could buy this or this or this.” On the demandplanning side, in some cases, carmakers provided Pirelli with visibility to dealer-level demand.
This manufacturer produces plastic reusable material handling containers and plastic fuel tanks. The Company operates eighteen manufacturing facilities, nine distribution centers located throughout North and Central America. At Dow, Mr. Baker had Purchasing experience in raw materials, and logistics for their plastics supply chain.
Like Linus clinging to his blanket, supply chain teams make most of their decisions on Excel spreadsheets. Or a unified data model across source, make, and deliver for planning? TMS and DRP have little in common, and revenue management operates isolated from demandplanning.) An ontology is a graph database use case.
Reason #2: Poorly executed or non-existent sales and operations planning. Over the years, working for and with numerous manufacturing companies, I’ve seen many supply chain practices that cost companies money. S&OP is all about aligning manufacturing and sales. Have you experienced poor S&OP planning processes?
In Figure 1, note the lowest satisfaction is Generation X (birth years of 1965-1980) in manufacturing organizations. In my share groups, large manufacturing clients have a Q1 freeze on travel. During a market downturn, the life of a demand planner is tough. 3) Buy Technologies that Supply Chain Planners Will Love.
<Bear with me… > Here I share a nine-step process in an attempt to help companies unravel the process for buying supply chain planning software. Let’s face a hard fact: the supply chain planning market is a mess. They center on how to make a good decision in the purchase of supply chain planning solutions.
Instead of high-level frameworks, attendees heard directly from global manufacturers including RHI Magnesita, Teleflex, and Marelli. Powered by o9 Solutions, the initiative aims to modernize planning and execution capabilities across the enterprise. The agenda prioritized outcomes over abstraction.
similarly, over 95% of manufacturers invested and implemented supply chain planning, but their primary tool today is Excel. The research supports that we have not improved supply chain visibility, and we are going backwards in delivering results through supply chain planning.” ” Does the Dog Hunt?
For Greater Product Performance Visibility and Improved Sales & DemandPlanning Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers operate in an increasingly competitive environment, where the ability to access and analyze timely, accurate data can make or break a company’s success. Each retailer organizes their data differently.
PWC’s Digital Trends in Supply Chain Survey reports that 83% of manufacturers say that supply chain technologies have not delivered the expected results. The models are too different to drive a clear signal from sales activity to demandplanning in the supply chain. For this blog post, never mind the comparison.
But there is good news: a convergence of process, data, and technology provides the real-time and predictive visibility needed to optimize supply chain planning, ensuring food manufacturers can build resilience now and for the future. Preparing for Market-Driven Demand. PlanningManufacturing Based on Demand.
This reality is compelling F&B companies to rethink their strategies and approach to supply chain optimization and demandplanning. Staying competitive in this intense landscape demands finely tuned operations that are highly efficient and effective – from product concept to customer consumption.
” I believe that the focus should be improving reliability (Forecast Value Added (FVA), first pass tender and yield, and manufacturing schedule adherence) while decreasing process, demand, and data latency. As a result, we need to throw away the conventional definitions of demandplanning and S&OP.
As a result, a wide range of businesses, from restaurants, and retail chains, to manufacturers, have been redesigning their business services and operations and re-engineering their supply chains. Emerging Themes for Supply Chain Planning. They can adjust quantities and generate supplier replenishment orders in PDF or Excel as needed.
To enable this shift, organizations must embrace “ touchless forecasting ,” which provides a unique scalable automation opportunity within demandplanning. This concept leverages AI and machine learning to automate baseline forecasting, freeing human planners to focus on more strategic tasks like scenario planning and risk assessment.
Too few are questioning the products that should have never been manufactured. Let’s face it our historic practices for demandplanning create waste in a more variable world. Supply-centric or Manufacturing Thinking. Functional metrics also result in the manufacturing of products that may not be needed.
I do believe in demandplanning, but most companies overstate forecast improvements. I worked for a software company for almost a decade and implemented demand management solutions in the 1990s for multiple companies. At that time, the demand processes were largely regional. ” I am in the middle. Moving Forward.
Many of the managers I speak with are buying into the application of artificial intelligence in the workplace, but often struggle to identify specific processes that are best suited for AI.I Many managers rely on trusted Excel spreadsheets, and this type of digital transformation will require significant training.In
Inventory is the lifeblood of any manufacturing business. By leveraging analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs), manufacturers can optimize inventory, reduce waste, and boost profitability. It supports smarter buying by showing which categories or products deliver the best ROI. But what exactly should you measure?
Driving an excellent supply chain depends on how people are recruited and managed, processes, and the technology used. Lead times expanded even for domestic manufacturers because they sourced raw materials from overseas. In the financial year covered by the annual report, the company had seven acquisitions and one divestiture.
Now that we’ve established that forecasting is important , you know what your demandplanning organization is going to do and how you plan to structure it , here we’ll address where to put it. If they are directing the demandplanning team, forecasts could be biased high. MERCHANDISING.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed manufacturers to rapidly shift gears, from addressing work-from-home policies to managing extreme swings in demand and uncertain supply chains. In the process, it has highlighted an aspect of manufacturing ERP that is not as visible in more normal times— business continuity.
Serving 4 million customers in 150 countries with a global team of 100,000 experts across more than 100 locations (manufacturing sites and distribution centers), Johnson Controls’ ability to plan is critical. “We have the entire gamut of manufacturing strategies,” remarked Scrimgeour.
The network senses, translates, and orchestrates market changes (buy- and sell-side markets) bidirectionally with near real-time data to align sell, deliver, make and sourcing organizations outside-in. Let’s start with a clear definition of the terms: Demand Networks. Demand Sensing. Demand Shaping.
HarbisonWalker International Manufactures and Distributes Refractory Products. But refractories are used in a wide variety of industries, particularly manufacturing industries with high temperature or corrosive production processes. It also includes information taken from HWI’s web site. Monolithics are unshaped refractory products.
Whether you''re a manufacturing company in China, a sourcing agent in London or a world''s leading company in Silicon Valley, we''re all in a global supply chain networks. Flexibility, in particular in manufacturing, is an important skill that when implemented well can produce long term efficiencies and robustness to the supply chain.
ToolsGroup’s service-driven multi-echelon inventory optimization (MEIO) provides a single view of demand and supply to help manage uncertainty and increase product availability. . “We That’s why global leaders like Absolut, BP and Harley-Davidson rely on us year after year.
However, if the focus is on implementing technology quickly, the teams never refine the models to improve outcomes and build planning capabilities. The third issue is the lack of understanding that global processes–to maximize the economies of scale in transportation and material buying–need strong governance.
We have validated each respondent as a user of supply chain planning. The research is a study of large manufacturers. Companies were disqualified if they were not mature in the use of planning, or if they were less than $1 billion in revenue. There is greater satisfaction with demandplanning than supply.
In 2013 Nokia took full ownership of Nokia Siemens Networks, buying the other half of the venture from Siemens, and 2014 sold its handset business to Microsoft. Nokia is currently preparing for another major change, its purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, which is expected to close in Q1 2016. By Helen Armstrong. It’s a one-stop shop.”.
There is omni-channel you can buy products anywhere, you can order stuff from your mobile phone and then get delivered to your home, and so on. So as a consumer, you have a lot more channels through which you can engage with the manufacturers. Then you do capacity planning, so on and so forth. Think of yourself as a consumer.
Cycle stock is the most effectively managed through the successful implementation of production planning. Cycle stock is the management of stock required to cycle through production runs and procurement buys effectively. This planning technology is tricky to implement and many of the technologies are not up to the task.
Faced with growing costs, demanding customers and paper thin margins (net margin is often under 1%), supply chain management often separates successful distribution companies from those that constantly struggle. Wholesale distributors act as aggregators of demand, buffering manufacturers from small orders and logistics complexity.
Having a good Supply Chain Management (SCM) process is crucial for offering excellent customer service. So far, we’ve seen how data is an integral part of the demandplanning cycle. However, completing this task becomes complex when multiple systems store demandplanning data.
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