Optimized planning for a profitable supply chain response
The days of a simple plan-source-make-deliver are long gone for most industries. Competing in fast-moving markets now requires agile planning and response that is both end-to-end and near-real time. With the scale and complexity of today’s supply chains, it can be challenging for planners to understand the nature and impact of constraints on supply and distribution plans. Is the problem a common raw material used in numerous products? Is a capacity shortage holding up high priority orders? Many planning systems require planners to manually iterate through multiple simulations to find the root cause and select a feasible option. A plan is only as good as its execution, and without close integration between planning and fulfillment, the timelessness and quality of the response suffer.
As the frequency and scale of unexpected demand and supply disruption events rise, how can companies create a faster, more accurate and more profitable response? The answer is to produce plans aligned with customer service priorities and incorporate current information from the entire supply chain. E2open’s Supply Planning & Response solutions use algorithms to evaluate all current constraints and ensure that highest priority customer demands are always met first. Planners are given the best feasible plan right away, instead of having to look for a solution by manually running multiple simulations. Planning and execution are closely synchronized so that the benefits of an improved plan are fully realized.
The result is an agile supply chain with supply, production and distribution resources all optimized to meet corporate service and financial goals. This level of responsiveness is foundation for leveraging supply chain as a competitive advantage and to delivering higher customer satisfaction, shorter time-to-market, and better profitability.
Maximize service and sales with a profitable and agile response to changes in demand or supply constraints. E2open's Supply Planning solution uses current material and capacity constraints from one or more levels of suppliers to create a global plan optimized to customer demand priorities. Planners get the best feasible operational plan within seconds, instead of manually running and reconciling multiple simulations. Powerful “what-if” analysis quickly evaluates alternate scenarios such as large upside sales, pulling orders into the current quarter or possible supply disruptions. Beyond these simulation capabilities, advanced algorithms and patented demand prioritization logic compute the best supply plan to meet the company’s strategic objectives and financial goals.
Supply planning is closely coupled to E2open's Order Promising & Allocation to ensure that allocations are aligned with the supply plan to maximize service and revenue. The combined use with E2open's Demand Planning creates the foundation for a complete supply chain planning system or record. Deployment with E2open's Demand Sensing enables an automated supply response in fast-moving markets by linking real-time demand with real-time supply planning.
Fill more demand on-time/in-full by prioritizing customer and channel fulfillment activities. E2open’s Distribution Planning solution generates a feasible distribution plan that considers the latest inventory levels, warehouse capacity constraints and demand prioritization. The same prioritization logic is used by E2open's Supply Planning to ensure that execution is aligned with planning. For an automated response to near-term changes in demand, accurate forecasts from E2open's Demand Sensing solutions can be fed directly to distribution planning. Planners can leverage “what-if” scenario capabilities to quickly evaluate the impact of changes in-between scheduled runs. The result is better overall customer service, ensuring the best service to highest priority customers, channels or regions.
