SUPPLY AND DEMAND PLANNING
TECHNOLOGY
68
“ The Covid situation has increased the need for automation within the warehouse . Companies are forced to change replenishment and picking processes to be more efficient ( example batch picking ). Automation increases productivity while reducing labour and actually provides for greater social distancing at the same time .”
— CHRISTINE BARNHART
and compliance with at least 600 regulations and in excess of 500 trade agreements . The sheer volume is almost unfathomable and thus a great example of how solution intelligence can filter out the noise and ensure that staff are spending their time and effort on those items that are critical to maintaining compliance and supporting business objectives .
Trade content and compliance data is part of every transaction , so systematically adding these elements digitally ( as opposed to manual keying and re-keying ) increases process velocity , improves profitability through delivering on-time — through an increased sales process and better cost management .
Additionally , digitising processes reduce operational costs and ensure suppliers have access to capital — programs based on the buyer ’ s credit and transaction performance — to reduce supplier borrowing costs , which keeps production flowing and decreases the potential for upstream delays . Finally , visibility helps ensure shipments are moving as expected and allows for better-planned hand-offs , resulting in reduced buffer inventory levels , as well as detention and demurrage costs .”
SUPPLY AND DEMAND PLANNING
“ An important area for Supply Chain Planning and especially Demand Planning is the detection of forecast outliers . If outliers are not detected , the demand plan is off , and this leads to an incorrect supply plan or incorrect decisions downstream , such as safety stock policy settings . By detecting the outlier in an early stage , the error can be corrected or excluded . Also , the manual selection of a specific statistical engine can lead to suboptimal results .
Demand Planning applies a combination of statistics and machine learning . There are many statistical engines where
JANUARY 2021