solutions for your business challenge

The Need for a New Supply Chain Planning Paradigm

For years companies have invested large sums of money in legacy demand planning and supply chain planning systems in hopes of improving their operations performance. While there have been some successes, increasingly companies are finding that legacy supply chain planning systems are falling short of their needs and expectations.

The modern supply chain is defined by pervasive, global outsourcing, increasing demand volatility and shrinking product lifecycles. The result is that the best possible plans are made…but then everything unravels. Legacy supply chain planning systems were not designed for this environment. While optimization solutions can provide value at a very local level — in factory planning, for example, where you want to optimize what is built the next day — they are not suited to today's complex, global supply chains, which require more collaboration and less control; more coordination and less optimization.

New challenges require new solutions — a new paradigm, for a new world. Solutions must embrace the reality that today's supply chains are multi-enterprise in nature and, thus, must provide clear visibility into the extended supply chain, along with tools that understand this virtual enterprise and its nuances. Today's solutions must

embrace and leverage human judgment since the number of unplanned events with high risk to the business is on the rise,
arm front-line staff with tools for risk tradeoff and response to deal with these situations quickly and appropriately to ensure a profitable response is put into action,
foster team-based decisions that tap the collective insight of the right people in the organization — those that understand the potential impact of any unplanned event and proposed action alternative and
enable people to leverage a single system with one set of data, no matter what the problem — whether it is a demand, supply or product issue that needs to be addressed.

Many of these requirements are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to capture in a mathematical model, the foundation of an optimization system. When they are, the speed at which they change and the time it takes to formulate the mathematical model make it infeasible to do so.

To deal with today's increasingly complex supply chains, you need an integrated solution that empowers your staff with planning, monitoring and response capabilities. Legacy demand planning and supply chain planning systems were not designed for today's complexities.

A Single On-Demand Offering for Solving Multiple Supply Chain Challenges

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ is this new breed of solution: a single on-demand offering for solving multiple supply chain challenges. RapidResponse…

continuously stores and compares states of plans to capture changes,
quickly anticipates and prioritizes risk,
alerts people to instantly 'what happened' and 'what is the consequence', combine,
combines human judgment with complex analytics in analysis of alternatives,
simulates trade-off and compromise positions in seconds to minutes and
commits decisions back into the plan.

RapidResponse uniquely delivers integrated demand-supply planning, proactive monitoring and collaborative response to deal with the increasing number of unplanned events that threaten your ability to meet your operations performance goals.

Click on a link below to see how RapidResponse can help solve your specific business challenge(s):