Increased Supply Chain Complexity and Volatility Intensifies Need for Alignment

Today’s supply chain professionals deal with enormous pressures. Because of constantly increasing supply chain complexity and unprecedented supply chain volatility, modern supply chain management challenges far exceed those of the past.

It should come as no surprise that many organizations are turning to their sales and operations planning (S&OP) process to find solutions for these challenges. Businesses count on S&OP to align their demand plans, supply plans, and all business functions to achieve their desired operations performance results.

But the pressures are mounting; achieving desired outcomes is increasingly difficult. As a result, S&OP processes must surmount many challenges, including:

• Quantity and diversity of demand inputs
• Different input sources specifying demand in varying terms (e.g., units vs. revenue)
• Collaboration hindered by diverse collection and sharing mediums (i.e., no single version of the truth)
• Difficulty identifying suspect data and no or minimal ability to rationalize forecasts against other input sources
• Problems connecting extended supply chain information to demand inputs
• No or limited ability to simulate different plan alternatives and compare them to key business objectives

Powering Next Generation Sales & Operations Planning

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ uniquely meets the needs of today’s sales and operations planning process—both in terms of developing the plan and in developing swift, profitable responses to plan deviations as they occur. RapidResponse supports S&OP with solutions for:

• Revenue and margin planning
• New product introductions
• Operations performance monitoring and alerts
• Multi-enterprise supply chain visibility
• Rough cut capacity and constraint planning
• Inventory reduction and rationalization

RapidResponse delivers these solutions by:

• Giving all stakeholders a single version of the truth by aggregating data from across the entire supply chain
• Coordinating collaborative inputs from all departments to develop a feasible plan
• Proactively monitoring the plan status to spot deviations that could put the plan at risk
• Providing rapid analysis of plan variations through simulation capabilities accessible to all users
• Supplying front line responders with data to support fast, effective decisions that meet operations performance objectives despite unplanned events

Follow the links to learn how RapidResponse delivers value to your business and value to IT.