solutions for your industry consumer products

Customer Expectations Escalate Along with Supply Chain Complexity

Like many markets, the consumer products market has been under the influences of globalization for the past several years. Globalization has ushered in an era of outsourcing and cost advantages, while also opening new markets overseas. But it has also brought along with it new competitors who often hold a local market advantage with greater brand awareness and established local retail outlets.

Global competition has empowered the consumer and driven up expectations. Today, consumers demand greater variety, availability and faster product innovation. They insist on more configuration options per product and expect to be able to select the configuration of their choosing — often changing their mind in the selection process.

The supply chain management challenges brought on by these consumer forces are significant. Consumer products manufacturers need greater supply chain visibility into the manufacturing commitments of their multi-tier supply chains and they need to be more flexible and responsive to changing demand patterns. They need to build more accurate plans, while improving their ability to respond to plan deviations that are defining their operations performance.

Exceeding Customer Expectations and Operations Performance Goals

With growing pressure on margins and operations performance objectives, consumer products manufacturers need to be resilient to change to thrive in today's market. They need to

• collaborate more closely with their customers to understand their demand requirements,
• excel at identifying demand-supply misalignments and taking corrective action and
• develop more accurate supply plans while orchestrating on-the-fly adjustments with their supply network partners to deal with the unexpected.

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ meets the needs of consumer products companies by delivering a collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring and response solution. RapidResponse helps develop more accurate demand plans and supply plans, while providing the supply chain management tools your staff needs to coordinate effective response to change.

RapidResponse capabilities provide solutions to

• supply chain visibility,
• demand management,
• supply management,
• sales and operations planning (S&OP) and
• supply chain risk management business challenges

These capabilities are delivered through a single on-demand service that delivers supply chain visibility, simulation and measurement against key performance indicators (KPIs) capabilities to ensure you are exceeding customer expectations and operations performance goals.

Success Stories

• Cut down spend analysis time by more than 50%
  — manufacturer of outdoor power equipment
• Does a full MRP explosion in minutes, compared to the eight hours it had taken previously. Overall, has seen results in higher inventory turns and reduction in safety stock, improvement in cycle times and reduction in lead times, more accurate promise dates and faster and more accurate analysis.
  — designer and manufacture of high-end bicycles