Industry: Electronics and High-Tech
Challenges
Farnell markets and distributes more than 600,000 electronic components and industrial maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) products to 430,000 customers in 36 countries.
As part of the effort to rebrand four businesses in its marketing and distribution division, Farnell wanted to cross-sell products across its subsidiary businesses and give customers access to a greater array of products from the Farnell company of their choice. With the Farnell initiative, the company needed to be able to deliver a single order from multiple warehouses, support the implementation of new warehouse locations, increase order visibility, improve service and reduce inventory levels.
Consolidating business groups and brands
Farnell needed to join core functions of the companies but keep the markets, skills and differentiators separate, and honor the unique brand loyalty behind each company.
Strategic inventory placement
The business needed a primary stock location for each product and to be able to ship to any of the brand’s customers anywhere in the world.
Faster order turnaround
Farnell wanted to provide next-day delivery, a big challenge given the more than 140,000 SKUs on its CD catalog.
Solutions
The Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform enabled Farnell to boost service levels without a corresponding rise in inventory levels and made it possible for the company to reduce overall inventories significantly at its Leeds, U.K., warehouse. Logility enabled Farnell to integrate supply chain and logistics functions across subsidiary operations.
Demand Planning and Optimization
Inventory Planning and Optimization
Supply Planning and Optimization
“A new warehouse in Liège, Belgium provided additional space to better serve the growing European market, along with the existing Leeds warehouse,” explained Jon Bates, head of supply chain for Farnell.
For example, to deliver on the promise of a unified global brand, Farnell had to change its product catalogs and give customers access to a broader array of products from a single Farnell company. Formerly, customers had to place separate orders to each individual Farnell company from separate product catalogs. Now, with Logility, a single catalog contains all products, and customers have access to more than 600,000 products that they can order from a single company.
By the same token, the company can split a single customer order across multiple warehouses, then seamlessly package and deliver it from multiple locations. Each Farnell brand is now transparent in terms of physical location of inventory.
“We needed to have a primary stock location for each product and be able to ship to any of the brand’s customers anywhere in the world,” Bates says. “Logility helps us determine where to place inventory more strategically and choose any warehouse to be the point of delivery, minimizing the number of stocking points. Demand forecasts are critical to this process and Logility will enable us to generate accurate forecasts and share valuable global demand information with our key suppliers,” Bates adds.
Farnell also wanted to be able to provide customers with next-day delivery, which is often a big challenge given the more than 140,000 SKUs on the CD version of its catalog, a heavy mixture of both slow and fast-moving products, and a catalog that continues to grow at the rate of 5,000 to 10,000 SKUs a year. With help from Logility, the company is able to better manage its investment while turning around orders faster than ever before.
Results
With Logility, Farnell was able to increase customer service levels while reducing inventory by 5%, facilitate corporate efforts to cross-sell products across Farnell companies and give customers access to over 400,000 products, as well as drive collaborative partnerships with key suppliers.
Change is the only constant in supply chain and often can cloud our visibility. ChainLink Research examines the need for accepting change and the importance of discovery as two foundations to help supply chain teams move forward and succeed in their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). As supply chainers we have learned and already codified much about every little grain of data about physical inventory and its dimensions, where it can be stored, and various routes to get it to the customer. However, there is so much more data that must be turned into actionable insights. The goal of the article, AI / Machine Learning for Supply Chain – Into the Future, is to examine what the new machine learning-enabled supply chain team should do to set the stage for now and in the future.
Unexpected events – pandemics, weather conditions, recessions and more – are inevitable. How can you best protect your organization from supply chain disruptions? Advanced Analytics can help you weather the storm by optimizing your supply chain now and in the future.
This on-demand webcast highlights how a supply chain digital twin powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can quickly analyze the impact of potential changes to accelerate the speed and precision required to make informed decisions. The webcast also highlights real-world examples of leading companies that use advanced analytics to turn vast amounts of data into actionable insights to improve service levels, margins and speed to market.
Listen and learn how to use Advanced Analytics to:
- Create a strong analytics foundation for modeling the unexpected, including using a digital twin to consider the impact of changes on business goals and customer service levels before you act
- Make the best decisions quickly when the worst-case scenario happens, including quickly anticipates spikes or drops in demand using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) including robust demand sensing
- Hear real-world examples of how companies are doing these things now
Supply chain transformation involves improving an organization’s abilities to make decisions about which products to keep in stock, where to keep them, when to replenish them, how to improve
service levels for customers, how to liquidate excess stock in the most profitable way and how to quickly respond to changes in customer demand. Supply chain planning transformation can enable real-time tracking and analysis of customer and product data, decision-making based on predictive and prescriptive models, and the use of new capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence, machine learning, social media and the Internet of things. It can also automate daily operational decisions to free up talent to work on higher value activities.
Supply chain planning is complex and a transformation initiative requires getting off to a good start with the support of senior management and a business case that outlines the benefits as well as the impact to the organization. This is a multi-dimensional journey that must ask the four following questions:
- What new process capabilities do you want your future supply chain planning platform to enable?
- What new data sources do you plan to utilize with your future supply chain planning platform?
- What new solution capabilities do you want to adopt to enable your transformed planning process?
- What new people skills will be needed to analyze data, operate new processes and use new solution capabilities?
Agile, data driven, speedy and highly automated supply chain planning operations are becoming increasingly critical in today’s fast-paced, global business world. This e-book provides practical steps and a best practice roadmap to guide you on your transformative journey.
In today’s supply chain business environment, improving insights to critical advanced analytics metrics via data visualization has become a critical element responsible for driving performance for any company.
Improving your organization’s ability to consume data in an intuitive, conventional manner to facilitate understanding can be the difference from taking action at the right time and avoiding potential disruptions due to lack of visibility.
It is becoming increasingly important to automate as much as possible, augment the human team with more insights and more data while incorporating visualization aspects that accelerate the decision making process.
This is done by tapping into new data sources, leveraging artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Then organizing that data and identifying new patterns that a human could not identify in a reasonable amount of time without AI. These insights are gathered from rich data, providing stronger information than from traditional data sets.
A strong visualization of insightful data is important to a business’s success with AI and advanced analytics. Visualizations create an engaging user experience that presents information in a highly intuitive way. Currently, there is a transition in the talent pool, and it is important to keep up with the digital natives entering the workforce and their expectations. How they navigate data and scenarios is different from someone who has been in that role for 20 years and grew up with data presented in a different way. Visualization of data and serving information in a more intuitive way is key.
By automating decisions where we can, and providing the needed analysis to determine the best approach, given what we know, we are able to free up the personnel to implement the work and think about the business more creatively.
Capturing big data for insightful, advanced analytics can be a hefty task, but is equally as important as the presentation of that data. The strong visualization of meaningful data is crucial to a business’s success with artificial intelligence and analytics. It creates an engaging user experience that presents information in a highly intuitive way. This paper explains the importance of visualization of data and what critical metrics can be improved with data visualization.
Supply chain disruptions happen – whether it’s the current COVID-19 situation, or future activities including other pandemics, unforeseen events or weather conditions such as hurricanes and tornadoes.
As a supply chain professional, you are in the power position of being able to learn from this experience and take actions now that can help your company be better prepared to face future supply chain disruptions, regardless of what shape they take.
So, will you be ready?
- Do you have a plan for adopting advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning in your supply chain operations?
- Do you have the ability to run multiple ‘what-if’ scenarios to analyze how your supply chain will be affected by different types of disruptions?
- Can you quickly sense a supply chain disruption, analyze options to mitigate it and execute the best response?
Logility can help. Our Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based digital supply chain platform can help with these things and more. For example, it leverages machine learning forecasts in scenario planning dashboards to let you easily see what’s going on and make the best decisions for your business. When supply chain disruptions happen, you can analyze and compare activities using a digital twin (a virtual mirror of your physical supply chain operations that lets you run multiple, what-if scenarios before you activate any changes) and make any adjustments in real time.
Explore this ebook, A Digital Transformation Guide for Supply Chain Disruptions, for eight tips to consider now to better plan and prepare for the future.
Plan for a resilient enterprise with Logility’s AI-based platform
This quick video shows how to plan for the resilient enterprise with Logility’s artificial intelligence (AI)- based supply chain planning platform and take back control during supply chain disruptions like the ones we are experiencing now with the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as future ones that could come from other pandemics, hazardous weather conditions, or some other unforeseen event.
Logility’s AI-based platform lets you evaluate machine learning forecasts using our scenario planner dashboard. As supply chain disruptions occur, simply compare and analyze actions in a digital twin (a virtual mirror of your physical supply chain operations that lets you run multiple, what-if scenarios before you pull the trigger on any changes) and adjust scenarios in real time to intelligently navigate the situation.
The Logility digital supply chain platform enables continuous planning that forms the foundation of a resilient enterprise. It lets you proactively optimize, sense and respond to actions across your business and proactively meet supply chain disruptions head on, and also supports the never-ending tactical, operational and strategic planning simulations that businesses should always be performing.
Consider Other Ways to Build a Resilient Enterprise
As a supply chain professional, you face a unique opportunity to take proactive action now and build a resilient enterprise for the future. Here are six things to keep in mind to take back control of your supply chain and start the journey to a resilient enterprise – the two go hand-in-hand:
- ERP alone is not the answer
- Deploy an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform now
- Make Continuous Planning a priority
- Create a Digital Twin
- Revisit data aggregation
- Create a culture of resiliency
If your current planning platform doesn’t address all of these six things and more, or to learn more about these six areas, contact Logility.
Supply chains are moving faster and faster and the complexity of data needed to manage them is growing exponentially. To quickly turn tremendous volumes of data into actionable insight, an increasing number of organizations are now turning to innovative digital supply chain planning platforms that are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
On its own, supply chain planning (SCP) provides the critical set of business processes that companies rely on for optimizing the delivery of goods, services, and information to their customers. Focused on balancing supply with demand, SCP manages real-time demand commitments, “what-if” scenario analysis, inventory optimization, and sales and operations planning (S&OP), among other functions, according to Gartner.
With increased speed in the supply chain, skilled labor is more difficult to find and retain, and customers are harder to please. Add in trade wars, economic uncertainty, and the risk of supply disruption to the equation, and you wind up with a perfect storm of supply chain challenges that—when combined with other hurdles—require the right mix of software and advanced technology to solve.
When companies incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into their supply chain planning activities, everyone wins. Layering advanced technologies like AI and ML into supply chain planning creates new capabilities and propels companies that want to stay ahead of the rapidly changing business landscape. Innovative digital supply chain platforms that are powered by AI and ML, combined with SCP can uncover hidden opportunities, identify potential risks and accelerate decision making – from product concept to customer availability, and all points in between.
In this Making the Case guide, we explore the opportunities that these advanced technologies offer and show how you can get the most out of the potential they offer. AI and machine learning are powerful tools that will continue to propel the supply chain, and in partnership with valuable supply chain practitioners.