solutions for your industry high tech & electronics

Gaining the Upper Hand on Increasing Supply Chain Volatility

Manufacturers today are increasingly challenged to deal with significant volatility. Supply chain volatility, particularly demand volatility, is on the rise driven by growing global competition and changing buying behaviors. Consumer expectations continue to escalate, while loyalty decreases. With the emergence of new consumer markets across the globe, products specific to individual local markets are demanded. Many manufacturers tell us that it has never been easier to lose a customer as it is today. Your competitor is a click away.

To gain first-mover advantage and market leadership, manufacturers are innovating at an unprecedented pace. It often takes less time to design and manufacture a new product than it does to sell and market it.

And while the trend toward global outsourcing provides benefits of global reach and focus, it also introduces more relationships to be managed and more potential for supply chain disruptions.

To compete in the face of this supply chain volatility, many manufacturers are investing in initiatives to become more customer-focused - building tighter working relationships with their top customers to provide superior service. One of the first challenges that face them on this journey is the realization that you can't plan the customer. The question then becomes how can you deliver a profitable response to changing customer demands?

For years, manufacturers have built processes to run the business like clockwork, but now the challenge is how to deal with the business when it doesn't run like clockwork. Manufacturers usually lack a strategic solution for one of their most daunting supply chain management challenges: rapidly responding to the "as it is" world. Without systems that provide global supply chain visibility, early alerting to issues, and predictive capabilities to identify consequences to change, manufacturers resort to very expensive and risky tactics such as carrying extra inventory and expediting both supply and finished goods deliveries. Even then, in many cases, they fail to fully meet customer expectations.

Profitable Response Across a Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain

For years, supply chain management solutions were built for specific, non-integrated business organizations and processes. This legacy approach to demand planning and supply chain planning worked reasonably well in a static world. But, in today's dynamic world of high supply chain volatility, manufacturers need collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring and response capabilities to deliver a profitable response across a multi-enterprise supply chain.

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ is that solution.

• RapidResponse starts by delivering all of your key personnel the role-based supply chain visibility they need to understand the current state of your multi-tier, multi-enterprise supply chain so they can not only know the impact of a change, but can fully leverage the entire network in a collaborative manner to develop the appropriate response.
• Proactive alerting ensures that each user is notified when unplanned events are happening that could negatively impact their ability to achieve their objectives, and which can threaten the operations performance of the entire company.
• Once notified, users collaborate with their peers across the supply chain to detail and select the action alternative that best meets corporate performance objectives for customer satisfaction, inventory, margins, etc.

Leading high-tech & electronics manufacturers around the world are using RapidResponse to deal with increasing volatility in demand, supply and product by

• creating better plans,
• monitoring performance to those plans and
• developing rapid and appropriate course corrections when the plan is at risk.

As a result, RapidResponse is driving breakthroughs in demand management, supply management, sales and operations planning (S&OP), supply chain risk management and lean manufacturing.

Success Stories

• Analyzing incremental demand takes less than 1 hr, with processing time being minutes, compared to processing time in SAP of 27 hrs & 56 hrs of total elapsed time
  — Semiconductor Equipment Manufacturer
• Customer forecast changes captured daily; de-aggregation to anticipate supply risk done in 15 minutes instead of 3 days
  — provider of business-to-business wireless enterprise applications and services
• Constraint issues within the contract manufacturing base are anticipated and preempted in 2 days instead of 2 weeks
  — provider of networking systems and solutions
• Demand change order information to purchasing—turnaround time reduced from 1 day to 5 minutes. Order commitment data to program management and sales—time reduced from 2-3 days to 4 hours. End of month inventory analysis—reduced from 1 week to 5 minutes. New order management—reduced from 2 hours to 5 minutes
  — provider of PCBs and electro-mechanical solutions