solutions suply chain management

Supply Chain Management Shifting to Become More Demand Driven

Traditional "push based" supply chains, driven by statistical forecasts, focused their supply chain management (SCM) initiatives on supply management. But increasing global competition and demand volatility are forcing manufacturers to transform their supply chain management initiatives to become more demand driven. AMR Research declares this the Demand Driven Supply Network (DDSN).

As manufacturers seek to become more demand driven, they quickly realize that they can't plan the customer. Lacking the proper tools to cope with increasing demand volatility, most supply chain managers are forced to rely on "blood, sweat and Excel." The resulting customer satisfaction challenges threaten both top and bottom line operations performance.

Numerous studies performed by industry groups such as AMR and Gartner have clearly established that companies with a mature sales and operations planning (S&OP) process out-perform those without. This important process ensures organizational alignment towards the achievement of key financial, operations, and market performance goals. The S&OP activity includes inputs and collaboration from all areas of the company (and from the extended supply chain) that affect those objectives.

A key challenge associated with this process is the collection of the inputs into a framework where risks, opportunities, and decision alternatives can be appropriately evaluated and presented to senior executives for the finalization of a consensus plan. The dimensions of the mature S&OP process will include key market and product plans, long range operations planning (demand, supply, constraints, supply network, supply chain strategies, etc.) and financial performance objectives. Most companies use off-line tools such as spreadsheets to gather, analyze, and present the S&OP plan. These tools do not easily facilitate simulation or collaboration as the aggregation of data from multiple disparate worksheets present many opportunities for errors during each iteration. In addition, they are poorly suited to support the transition from plan to execution and ongoing monitoring.

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ addresses these shortcomings by providing a fully integrated environment where plans can be more easily developed, shared, transitioned to execution, and monitored in a single environment. To become more demand driven, RapidResponse enables manufacturers to improve demand planning through enhanced customer collaboration and improve execution of the sales and operations plan by ensuring profitable responses to changing demand.

RapidResponse was designed for a demand driven world. RapidResponse transform supply chain management practices by empowering supply chain managers with tools for collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring and response to change. You can leverage RapidResponse to solve a variety of supply chain management business challenges, including: supply chain visibility, demand management, supply management, sales and operations planning (S&OP) and supply chain risk management.