- “In the highly dynamic digital camera industry, companies who want to remain at the forefront must be armed with the ability to quickly and effectively respond to constantly evolving customer demands. RapidResponse empowers Nikon with the tools and technology to achieve this competitive imperative.”
Nikon: Focusing on a ‘Picture Perfect’ Supply Chain
Headquartered in Tokyo, Nikon Corporation is the world leader in digital imaging, precision optics and photo imaging technology. Nikon has three major divisions, the largest of which is the Imaging Products division, consisting largely of digital cameras, film cameras, lenses, photographic accessories, software and other products. The Imaging Products division has manufacturing and sales sites throughout Asia Pacific, Europe and North America and produces more than 1 billion cameras each year.
The Nikon Challenge
For Nikon, rapidly changing business conditions have put increased pressure on supply chain management (SCM), thereby making supply chain execution a competitive imperative in the cutthroat digital camera space.
In today’s digital age, consumers are always in search of new products that offer the latest advancements in digital technology. As such, the Imaging Products group is constantly updating digital cameras with new features based on customer feedback and market trends. This requires a dynamic, consumer-driven supply chain that is responsiveness to ever-increasing demand volatility.
Despite implementing multiple supply chain management processes and systems over the years, the company increasingly struggled to meet its goals of minimizing inventory risk (both excess and shortages) and improving customer service. Nikon’s existing systems proved to be unfit to support the short lifecycles of digital products as well as the ever-growing number of supply chain plan exceptions. As well, the company’s systems and its use of various Excel spreadsheets did not offer the multi-enterprise visibility and deep analysis functionality required for the complex organization.
Nikon recognized that the company simply could no longer expect to make a product as planned – nor consistently and accurately forecast demand. Nikon needed to evolve the company’s SCM system from a standalone system running on a monthly cycle to one that can be as dynamic as the market. In short, the company required a tool that empowers rapid, sound decision making in response to the volatility of the business environment.
The Kinaxis Advantage
Nikon embarked on a SPEED (Supply Chain for Effectiveness, Essentials and Discipline) project with the goals of reducing inventory levels and preventing sales opportunity loss (which encompassed reducing lead times, increasing inventory turns and improving delivery times). Upon assessing a number of solutions, Nikon concluded that RapidResponse was the best – and only – solution that could address the company’s full spectrum of SCM requirements and maximize its market responsiveness and operations performance.
After a short deployment period, RapidResponse now provides Nikon with increased supply chain visibility across its extended supply network, thereby empowering users with a single version of the truth. The solution provides Nikon with the ability to access accurate and up-to-date information in a flexible, easy-to-use spreadsheet interface embedded with powerful analytics that is automatically populated with live data feeds from Nikon’s existing transactional system.
Nikon depends on RapidResponse for several key functions, such as:
Demand Management — Simulating, comparing and scoring multiple sales scenarios to determine Nikon’s sales schedule;
Purchasing Sales and Inventory (PSI) Planning — Enabling the recalculation and distribution of plans at any time.
Supply Planning — Producing realistic production plans that automatically consider all impacting factors (e.g. inventory levels, capacity constraints, production loads); and
Finished Goods Allocation — Dynamic demand-supply balancing across sales sites.
The Results Speak for Themselves
RapidResponse has revolutionized Nikon’s approach to supply chain management and has drastically reduced manual processes and the use of spreadsheets. Information from multiple sites and divisions are now all consolidated in RapidResponse, and users are able to model data in real-time to instantly simulate and share countless “what-if” supply and demand scenarios, facilitating the necessary tradeoffs to profitably respond to changes, thereby ensuring ongoing alignment of daily actions (and reactions) with Nikon’s critical corporate goals.
As part of their SPEED project, RapidResponse has helped Nikon shorten cumulative lead times (planning, manufacturing and delivery) to the company’s’ goal of six weeks, as well as significantly improving overall inventory management (avoiding excess and obsolete inventory while ensuring no stock-outs at the retail level).
RapidResponse has been instrumental in maximizing the company’s sales opportunities and minimizing loss of business to competitors.
About Kinaxis
Kinaxis™ helps manufacturers manage increasing business complexity and achieve operations performance breakthroughs with its proven solution for demand and supply chain planning, monitoring and response. Kinaxis RapidResponse is an on-demand service that enables collective risk tradeoff and response to change by empowering front-line decision makers with integrated tools for supply chain visibility, demand management, supply management, sales and operations planning (S&OP) and supply chain risk management. Global leaders such as Casio, Jabil, Qualcomm, and Raytheon are realizing superior customer satisfaction and a competitive advantage with RapidResponse. For more information, visit www.kinaxis.com or the Kinaxis blog at www.21stcenturysupplychain.com.
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