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consumer products
Are Your Customers Demanding More?
We know what you are facing
Like just about all markets, the consumer products industry has felt the influence of globalization for the past several years. We are now in the era of outsourcing, which has offered serious cost advantages and opened new markets overseas.
The downside? New competitors.
Global competition has empowered the consumer and driven up expectations. Today, consumers want more, more, more: more variety, more availability, more product innovation. They insist on more configuration options per product and expect to be able to pick the configuration they want—often changing their mind in the process.
For consumer products manufacturers, it's become a headless monster. More supply chain complexity, and less time to manage it.
Today's Challenges in Consumer Products
We Can Help You Get Ahead of Customer Expectations
If you want to get ahead of customer expectations and meet your S&OP and supply chain management challenges head on, we can help.
What if you could…
- Gain supply chain visibility into the manufacturing commitments across your multi-tier supply chain?
- Collaborate more closely with your customers to understand their ongoing demand requirements?
- Excel at immediately identifying demand-supply misalignments and taking corrective action as it happens?
- Develop more accurate sales and operations plans while orchestrating on-the-fly adjustments to deal with the unexpected?
Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ helps consumer products companies do all this. With RapidResponse, you can build more accurate plans, as well as improve your ability to respond to daily plan deviations that, taken in sum, can make or break operations performance.
The Supply Chain is Complex, and the Consumer is in Charge—Now What?
Let's face the facts: Consumers are less patient and less brand loyal. They want what they want where and when they want it. Period.
Manufacturing products in this environment is hard. The cost savings of outsourcing are nice, but there is a trade-off. It increases the complexity of your company and moves management of critical operations outside of your four walls. You are left with an extended supply chain that may be less responsive to change. And with consumer whims as today's market driver, things are moving at lightning speed, and change is a constant.
The question of survival for consumer product companies becomes: How do you satisfy the customer—especially when using inventory as your buffer is no longer a viable option?
- “Cutting back on inventory, and still being able to fulfill customer orders at a 98 or higher percent rate—it becomes challenging to execute to those standards…”
-
Domingo Rodriguez, production manager, MTD
Consumer product manufacturers rely on RapidResponse to turn their S&OP and supply chain management pains into gains.
- MTD reduced safety stock and lead times. It now provides more accurate promise dates for finished goods and can identify potential component stock outs earlier. RapidResponse has cut down spend analysis time by more than 50%.
- Cannondale increased inventory turns, reduced safety stock, improved cycle times, reduced lead times, and increased accuracy of promise dates and analyses. It also reduced the time to conduct a full MRP explosion from eight hours to just minutes.
Want to learn more about how RapidResponse can help you increase customer service and reduce inventory risks by closing the gap between planning and execution?
