Balance demand, inventory and capacity.
Demand forecasting, supply planning, industrial workload. These trade-offs are often made on last week's figures, with no visibility of what they cost in margin.
The situation
The topics that keep coming up in supply chain.
The difficulty is not producing a plan, but producing a new one fast enough when an assumption changes.
- The demand forecast lives in one file, the supply plan in another, and the two diverge
- Stock-outs are discovered in store rather than upstream
- Safety stock is a fixed parameter, rarely revisited by season
- Capacity and lead-time trade-offs are decided with no view of the margin impact
- A change in tariffs or suppliers takes several days of reworking
- The S&OP meeting brings together teams arriving with three versions of the figures
In practice
An S&OP review screen.
Forecast demand, available capacity and stock cover over the same horizon, with the weeks under strain flagged.
Planned load by production site
Stock cover by family
Illustration of an S&OP review. Fictional data.
What we put in place
The modules we deliver in supply chain.
Demand forecasting
Statistical forecast realigned on actual sales, enriched with sales input and the promotional calendar.
Inventory and cover
Safety stock calculated by family and by season rather than set once and for all.
Supply and phasing
Supplier order plan, delivery dates and tracking of slippage against schedule.
Capacity and production
Load set against capacity by site, line and week, with subcontracting trade-offs.
S&OP and IBP
A process where finance, sales and supply arrive with the same figures.
Cost and margin by SKU
Fully loaded cost, freight and duties included, through to margin by SKU and by market.