Industry: Life Sciences

Reach corporate social responsibility goals while improving your economic sustainability.

Key Takeaways: 

  • You make important decisions daily that affect both your own corporate responsibility goals and external ESG demands from consumers and investors 
  • Vendors can make or break your broad supply chain goals, which makes real-time, AI-analyzed data essential for supply chain decision-making 
  • Self-reporting and a cumbersome audit process present dangerous challenges that can be overcome with an integrated platform 
  • To supply the detailed reporting required by all stakeholders, complete transparency into your entire supply chain is needed 
  • One bad vendor decision can damage your brand beyond repair, so constant vigilance and swift action are necessary 

Supply chain executives make vital decisions daily. Disruptions – from wars to COVID-19 lockdowns to a lack of containers – just add to what is already a complex undertaking. A holistic approach using reliable, properly analyzed data is required to achieve both your business and corporate responsibility goals.  

Data is useless if it’s not actionable. True corporate social responsibility (CSR) requires vigilance and compliance throughout the entire supply chain, and this takes properly analyzed data. This is especially important in vendor management. Your vendors can be your greatest strength or a source of serious liability. When it comes to supply chain decision-making, you need a digital corporate responsibility solution. 

Ethics and sustainability affect brand value, and corporate responsibility in the supply chain is a huge part of this. Supply chain leaders who understand public concerns about the environment, health, and safety know that nothing affects this equation as much as their vendors. 

Do your vendors present environmental, regulatory, or other risks to your company values? Can you trust their self-reporting? What about a vendor’s location or other factors that might affect their performance? With so many unknowns plaguing your supply chain decisions, this is one area where the right data and AI-supported analysis means you can move forward with confidence. 

Socially Responsible and Economically Sound 

A sustainable supply chain is no longer an option, as both consumers and investors clamor ever louder for brands to up their game when it comes to environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). They want to know where everything comes from, its environmental impact, and that it was produced by people who are treated fairly and humanely. 

You want all of this, too, but you might not be sure how to get there, especially in an era of such profound uncertainty. You must be sure that the decisions you make don’t just work for today but will continue to work in the future to meet your economic goals. The economic sustainability of your company is at stake as much as anything else.  

Uncertainty aside, even in times of relatively smooth supply chain operation, you never know what’s coming up next. But you can probably guess that new compliance standards and regulations are likely. Consumer demand is sure to rise. Trade embargoes will follow political turmoil. Not only do those factors put your reputation on the line, but they can also damage the viability of your enterprise.  

Fortunately, there are powerful digital solutions that can give you the actionable information you need to both accelerate and improve your supply chain decision-making. 

Enhance Financial Performance, Boost Reputation, Strengthen your Supply Network 

Data confidence is everything as ESG demands become an integral and inescapable part of supply chain decision-making. It is imperative that companies build stronger and more sustainable supply chain networks. This can only be done via better management of governance assessments and audits, which then fuel better, sustained collaboration with your entire vendor network.  

Audits are vital but time-consuming, incredibly inefficient, and error-prone – often facilitated by an exchange of emails. Self-reporting has its own unique set of issues. What’s required is a digital solution that offers easy integration, storage, and the analytics you need to achieve transparency, sustainability, and better supply chain decision-making. 

Your corporate responsibility solution should: 

  • Surface variants between audit findings and self-reported scores and analyze the results 
  • Issue corrective action plans and adjust your sourcing plans in real time with consideration of a supplier’s progress toward sustainability objectives 
  • Offer reports that allow you to publicize practices and findings to all stakeholders with full transparency and confidence. 

The right platform will give you a single source of supplier data you can use to assess vendor compliance. Because form numbers and identifiers vary, seamless mapping of data is required to ensure you’re viewing the same information without having to cross-reference multiple systems.  
 
You’ll want to be able to collect factory certifications as well as manage all ESG-related assessments. As CSR has become subject to more mandatory regulations, self-regulation is no longer possible, which makes data-driven supply chain decision-making mandatory. 
 
It is incumbent on organizations today to make sure they have the information they need to plan, schedule, and perform multiple assessments. Further, you want to be able to capture and evaluate the results so you can generate improvement plans. This allows you to remediate issues, assist supplier-users with training, and craft an exit plan to shift non-compliant suppliers out.  
 
All of this results in stronger supply chain partners who will appreciate a fair and efficient system that motivates them to adopt best practices, knowing that compliance is the key to retaining your business. 

It’s a Matter of Long-Term Value 

A digital solution to corporate responsibility has a positive impact on the world, but it also supports your long-term business growth. Compliance standards must be met, consumer demands fulfilled, and investors satisfied. Greenwashing is unacceptable. Transparent, verifiable reporting is essential.  

A non-sustainable supply chain exposes your company to avoidable business risks, including damage to your brand reputation and foreseeable supply chain disruptions. The data gleaned from a transparent supply chain will optimize your business planning as well as streamline product movement and balance supply and demand for inventory.  

Ultimately, sound supply chain decision-making that supports all the requirements of the ESG enterprise requires data and AI analysis supplied by the right digital supply chain platform. 

Sound, Sustainable, and Profitable Supply Chain Decisions Start with Logility 

Logility provides the supply chain platform that allows you to trace sustainability through all tiers of your sourcing. Our platform utilizes AI, machine learning, and automation to help easily track and analyze your supply chain, so you always have optimal performance and key insights. Make better decisions and make more profits. Contact us today. 

Use a two-pronged approach that couples new recruitment approaches with technology to provide transparent operational insight. 

Key Takeaways: 

  • Supply chain disruptions and labor shortages provide separate yet connected challenges 
  • Labor shortages are a global problem – contraction has already happened in Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan and is expected to quicken 
  • From the top floor to the shop floor, workers are quitting their jobs at a rapid rate 
  • Supply chain executives must look at new sources for workers and provide the technology that allows the supply chain visibility they need to recruit and retain top talent 
  • It’s a time of crisis, but out of ashes often comes opportunity; get ready! 

Today’s supply chain is challenged by the impact of what would appear to be two disparate challenges: constant supply chain disruptions, and what’s been dubbed “The Great Resignation.” Organizations must use every means at their disposal to keep goods moving while at the same time preventing their most important resource – their talent – from jumping ship at an alarming pace. 

Roughly 25% of workers plan to change jobs in 2022. In February alone, 22,000 people in the U.S. resigned from their jobs in durable goods manufacturing. Food supply chains already heavily damaged by the effects of COVID-19 have received yet another blow from labor shortages. The trucking industry was down 80,000 drivers in 2021, and that shortage is anticipated to balloon to 160,000 by 2030. 

ease labor shortages and increase supply chain resiliency

It’s a global problem. The labor supply is shrinking in Germany, Poland, Russia, and Japan, and contraction is expected to quicken. China, which had a worker surplus of 55.2 million to 75.3 million in 2020, could have a worker shortage of up to 24.5 million by 2030. The overall outlook for supply chains is bleak, leaving executives racking their brains for the key to supply chain resiliency.  

It’s time for decisive action. Let’s look at how labor and talent shortages wreak havoc on a supply chain, and the steps leaders can take to solve problems now and protect their organizations in the future. 

How Labor and Talent Shortages Affect Supply Chains 

There are labor shortages affecting all aspects of the supply chain, from raw materials to final product delivery. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, while the manufacturing sector as a whole is projected to have some pandemic recovery employment growth, it also contains 11 of the 20 industries that are predicted to have the most rapid employment declines. These include transportation and material moving, warehouse and fulfillment center workers, truck drivers, call center agents, delivery services, and manufacturing workers. 

It’s not just skilled, semi-skilled, and manual labor that’s lacking. Supply chain managers are also leaving, with more mulling over their part in the great resignation. This is all happening while the proliferation of eCommerce has driven up demand for supply chain labor. Then, there’s the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – the construction industry is expected to pull workers from the supply chain since both logistics and construction attract similar worker pools.  

Of course, all of this has obvious effects on the supply chain, including:  

  • A lack of longshoremen and dock workers to unload ships 
  • Not enough drayage drivers, which means shipping containers sit in ports instead of moving down the chain 
  • A shortage of long-haul truckers – so shippers can’t move inventory quickly from ports to distribution centers 
  • Warehouses are understaffed and distribution centers can’t work at full capacity. This results in delays that cause material or inventory shortages that affect both manufacturers and retailers 
  • Fulfillment centers that are short of workers can’t keep pace with order fulfillment volumes fueled by eCommerce. 

And so it goes on, and on, and on. Labor shortages in any of these instances cause issues up and down the supply chain, but combined they have a crippling effect. You’re likely aware of these issues, so let’s move on to what you can do to minimize the effects of labor shortages on supply chain resiliency. 

Supply Chain Resiliency in the Face of Labor Shortages: A Two-Pronged Approach 

Supply chain executives have two problems here. You have the seemingly uncontrollable supply chain disruptions along with a labor and talent shortage. The remedy is far from simple, but you can greatly reduce the impact of these challenges with advanced technology coupled with talent management strategies.  

To ensure you have the workers you need now and in the future, approach your talent pipeline the same way you approach your supply chain: 

  • Make sure you have complete visibility into your supplier base. Implement a supply chain management platform that easily allows you to find suppliers with large labor forces who can ensure operational viability and find and connect with alternative vendors that can lower first- and second-tier risk. 
     
  • Look beyond wages. Competitive wages and attractive benefit packages go far, but take time to examine why workers are leaving your organization and implement fixes. Automate what you can to reduce repetitive work. 
     
  • Identify stresses in your supply chain and adjust labor flows. Shift the flow in your supplier network away from those who are labor-stressed. Reroute orders to other warehouses and manufacturing locations. If necessary, change product design or formulations to reduce the need for components and ingredients from labor-strained areas. 
      
  • Take a look at your product and services portfolios so you have a deep understanding of each offering and its trade-offs, both operationally and commercially. The goal is to reduce complexity in a way that has a limited impact on sales.  

Solving the labor crunch also means exploring new sources of supply. Transition programs for prisoners and veterans’ programs can be good sources of labor. Also, look for workers in industries where employment is declining and reskill them. Connect with local community colleges and technical schools. 
 
Returning to the issue of visibility – because how can you fix something you can’t see? – demand planners play a big role here. A digital supply chain platform can give planners the insight they need to account for different scenarios and facilitate collaboration across the organization to solve current problems and plan for the future.  

And for supply chain resiliency even during labor shortages, you need a platform that offers a user-friendly interface along with deep analytics that can attract and retain top planning talent. stichd, a Netherlands-based product licensing company and division of PUMA, recently selected the Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform to support its ambitious growth strategy and demonstrate investment in its workforce. “Growth is our top priority. To continue achieving our goals, it was critical to find a planning platform with more sophisticated forecasting and clear visibility capabilities, but that is also easy for our employees to use,” said Rogier Wijnhoven, COO at stichd. 
 
Today’s challenges require informed decision-making. You need transparency: real-time data along with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation that continually senses, analyzes, and updates activity throughout your entire supply chain. You need granular detail to reach peak operational performance and to prepare for unexpected supply chain events – labor shortages and otherwise. 
 
As John F. Kennedy said, “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters – one represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” Be sure you have all the tools you need, both human and digital, to overcome today’s dangers and be poised for tomorrow’s opportunities. 

Get the Solutions You Need for True Resiliency with Logility 

Logility helps companies accelerate their digital, sustainable supply chain by providing solutions that don’t just present and model data – they drive actionable insights that deliver real and measurable value, so companies can respond to changing market dynamics and more profitably manage their complex global business. 

The Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform leverages an innovative blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to automate planning, accelerate cycle times, increase precision, improve operating performance, break down business silos, and deliver greater visibility. We help you make smarter decisions faster – reach out to our team to discuss our supply chain solutions. 

Look deeper than ever before. Reduce risk. Increase profits. Make your customers happier. 

Key Takeaways: 

  • Supply chain visibility offers the means to manage your supply chain efficiently as well as help you meet ESG and corporate responsibility goals 
  • The transparency gained through complete supply chain visibility increases supply chain efficiency, increases profit margins, and strengthens customer and supplier relationships 
  • End-to-end supply chain visibility allows you to massage and control every piece of your supply chain for optimized results for both you and your customers 
  • Modern supply chains need modern technology — you can’t get visibility with emails, phone calls, and spreadsheets 
  • A digital supply chain management platform gives you the data you need along with the analysis required for informed decision-making and complete visibility 

Today’s supply chains are messy, tangled beasts. Even in the best of times, they can be unwieldy, and keeping track of your suppliers, your suppliers’ suppliers, and… You know the drill. Insights can be hard to come by as investors, consumers, and boards of directors are upping their environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria and demanding greater corporate responsibility. A transparent view of the supply chain is required.  

It’s not just about meeting ESG goals. Supply chain visibility offers the means to manage your supply chain efficiently by offering previously unseen opportunities. In days of yore, you didn’t need such in-depth visibility, but today, as supply chains grow more complex and stretch further across the globe, you need a 360-degree view, from raw material sourcing to final product delivery. 

As procurement and supply leaders examine their supply chains, they often turn to things like spreadsheets or try to hack their current software to create a DIY solution. What they end up with is an unresponsive, inflexible system and no visibility at all into the supplier data they need. Supply chain visibility has become critical, so we’ll look at what good supply chain visibility really means, why it’s important, and why you need a unified digital supply chain platform. 

What Is End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility? 

End-to-end supply chain visibility is the ability to track individual components – beginning with raw materials, sub-assemblies, and finished products – as they travel from supplier to manufacturer to the final destination. It’s enabled through technology that provides real-time data about all aspects of your supply chain, gathering usable data that gives your company the agility to work around inventory shortages, sidestep bottlenecks, and meet any compliance requirements. 

It’s visibility inside and out – into your internal business operations and all external partners. The transparency gained through complete supply chain visibility increases supply chain efficiency, increases profit margins, and strengthens customer and supplier relationships. 

Why Is Supply Chain Visibility Important? 

Supply chain visibility is essentially about control. As time has marched on, companies have outsourced more and more pieces of their supply chains, making them difficult to control, and this is where supply chain visibility comes in. The transparency gained can alter your organization’s operations as interactions and relationships with both suppliers and customers improve.  

A digital supply chain management platform means you can pull data not only internally but directly from suppliers, providing detailed insight into each component you use or sell. Risk is reduced as visibility into upstream partners means you’re notified immediately of any disruptions, so problems can either be solved or circumvented.  

At this level of visibility, you can track movement throughout the supply chain. There would be documentation for the use of raw materials, components used in the production process, and, upon completion, you can see the exact location of finished goods. Once goods leave the plant, they can be tracked on ships, trucks, or planes as they travel through customs and other checkpoints.  

Your digital supply chain platform should also include a corporate responsibility solution to track social compliance and environmental status that allows you to initiate, review, monitor, and submit corrective action plans. You also need a view into the environmental status of all suppliers to ensure compliance with your corporate responsibility practices. 

Supply chain visibility also offers the benefits of: 

  1. Simplifying complexities: By providing insights across your diverse supplier network, you not only anticipate and solve logistical issues that can hurt customer relationships and decrease profits but also add a level of trust and transparency. 
  1. Increasing customer satisfaction: By making sure the right products are at the right locations at the correct time, you offer the ability for customers to track their orders from the factory to their loading dock. 
  1. Easier compliance: Your international supply chains have intense regulatory requirements, and these are changing all the time. Decrease the risk to your reputation, too, by ensuring that the behavior of all your supply chain partners is ethical.  
  1. Boosted competitiveness: Your supply chain is costly, and likely is one of your largest budget line items. 
Visibility Takes a Digital Supply Chain Platform 

Visibility doesn’t just happen, and it will never happen using phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets. It doesn’t matter if you’re monitoring supplies and products at a batch or individual item level. Monitoring safety, legal, and material certifications; order and vendor information; status and location of suppliers; and manufacturing dates – all are integral parts of the highly visible supply chain.  

Supply chain visibility first and foremost relies on data. Relevant, real-time data across the supply chain. Then, this data must be analyzed and acted upon. To achieve this requires a robust digital supply chain platform that utilizes advanced, intelligent technologies with a focus on process improvements that drive efficiency and monitor corporate responsibility. 

A modern digital supply chain platform also enables resilience with end-to-end visibility and capabilities for supplier management combined with contingency planning, crisis management plans, and incident response strategies. It’s important to note that end-to-end today doesn’t mean a linear progression. The circular supply chain concept is gaining traction, as manufacturers seek to meet sustainability goals by recycling and reusing stock. You want to be able to capitalize on reverse logistics, as well, to be sure you’re capturing the value of or properly disposing of excess goods, whether from returns or because they were unsold.  

You want artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to inform and improve decision-making, forecasting, and planning, as well as to perform the advanced calculations that turn visibility into actionable information. 

Supply chain visibility is essential to business success. You need insights into every nook and cranny of your supply chain to achieve efficiencies that deliver the profits necessary to flourish. In addition, you need the means to both validate and transparently report on progress toward your ESG goals, not to mention keeping on top of the ever-changing regulatory environment. 

Get Vital Supply Chain Visibility with Logility 

The Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform supports you to drive a visible, sustainable digital supply chain. It leverages data-driven tools such as advanced analytics and AI that empower your business to meet today’s supply chain complexities head on. You get the supplier data and other analytics you need to meet your transparency goals as well as your revenue goals.  

We help organizations sense and respond to changing market dynamics and more profitably manage their global businesses and become resilient, sustainable enterprises. It’s time for a digital, sustainable supply chain. Reach out to our specialists today to discuss our supply chain solutions. 

While the supply chain talent wars continue, it’s incumbent upon today’s business owners to consider whether the technology they use day to day has any ‘wow’ factor. Demand parameter optimization has that ‘wow’ factor.

In this post we look beyond the more conspicuous and well-documented benefits of advanced supply chain technologies, such as increased speed to market, more efficient operations, improved customer satisfaction and the ability to thrive during ecosystem shocks large and small. This post considers the human element, the brains that use the technology to derive insights and take action. 

As you’ve no doubt heard and perhaps experienced, the recruitment and retention of tech talent is a matter of great urgency. Many business leaders around the world are happy the pandemic is waning, but wondering where all the people have gone. More than 19 million U.S. workers have quit their jobs since April 2021, disrupting businesses everywhere. 

The brain drain would rightly be viewed as critical even if the goal were to simply replace lost headcount. But it’s more dire than that; many companies have embarked on aggressive plans for incremental hiring in the coming years. Consider these statistics from McKinsey: 

  • Facebook plans to hire 10,000 people in Europe to build out its “metaverse” 
  • Amazon announced plans to add more than 55,000 people in the U.S. for corporate and technology jobs 
  • In Germany, 780,000 additional technology specialists are needed by 2026 to meet the estimated demand 
  • Globally, more than three million cybersecurity positions were open as of 2020. 

Business leaders are feeling pressure. According to a McKinsey survey of more than 1,500 senior executives globally, 87% say their companies “are not adequately prepared to address the skill gap.” 

Now let’s circle back and pose the question hinted at above: can commitment to and adoption of modern supply chain technology help recruit and retain top talent? The short answer is that talented knowledge-workers want to use the latest and greatest tools. McKinsey quotes a stack overflow survey that shows  “the… technologies I’d be working with” is much more important than, for example, “the industry that I’d be working in” when making a job choice. 

Beyond Excel

Of course, winning the supply chain talent war requires much more than committing to “an Excel-free work environment,” but continual access to modern solutions and capabilities is an aspect that businesses shouldn’t ignore. One such capability among many in the Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform portfolio is demand parameter optimization (DPO), a machine learning application that automatically fine-tunes a subset of forecast parameters in order to improve forecast accuracy. DPO can process thousands of items simultaneously, selected by filter (such as inventory classification) or by alert (such as forecast error threshold). The result: a significant reduction in the amount of time spent manually tuning plus better quality forecasts. 

And with improved forecast accuracy comes reductions in inventories, lost sales, expediting costs and obsolescence costs. Moreover, demand parameter optimization enables autonomous planning, reducing the hours spent by planners manually manipulating parameters. This in turn increases the time available for other planning tasks, such as exception analysis triggered by workflow alerts. 

As one Logility customer put it: “Not one of my planners goes home at night and brags that they got to use a spreadsheet at work. But when they’re using modern planning tools like DPO to evaluate scenarios and reduce planning error, and they’re really in the zone, I see the joy of learning on their faces, and the joy that comes with knowing they are making a difference. They benefit, and so does the business.”  

More Tech Doesn’t Equal More Value to the Customer

Logility’s Kevin McInturff, EVP of R&D, says: “At Logility, we offer the perfect blend of foundational strength and the desire to innovate. Our product visionaries never lose their footing. Companies that are overly enamored with their own technology often focus their efforts on the pursuit of the next shiny toy. The reality is more technology just for the sake of it does not always equal value for the client. While others give in to the temptation to be led by their technology, we will always allow the voice of the customer to guide us toward solving real supply chain problems.” 

Read about how stichd – a division of PUMA – chose the Logility platform for its “sophisticated forecasting and clear visibility capabilities” in this recent press release.

A transparent digital supply chain will give you the insights you need for faster fulfillment. 

Key Takeaways: 

  • Same-day delivery is preferred by most consumers today, and supply chains must speed up to match that fulfillment speed. 
  • Fulfillment can be delayed anywhere in the supply chain, but if you can’t see where it’s happening, you can’t do anything to fix it. 
  • Promises made must be promises kept, or your customer satisfaction will take a dive – automation is the answer. 
  • Increasing numbers of consumers will abandon their shopping cart if they can’t get things when they want them, and this goes across verticals that include apparel, food, and beverages. 
  • Logility’s digital supply chain platform can help you capture your part of the predicted $9.2 billion growth by 2025 for same-day delivery. 

It’s no secret that order fulfillment is complex with many moving parts. It’s also true that, in today’s competitive ecosystem with consumer demand for almost instant delivery, speed and efficiency are of the essence. Achieving this requires deep insight into the entire multi-stage supply chain, from order receipt to final delivery. 

The economic sustainability of your business depends on fulfilling orders, of course. Preserving that sustainability and increasing profits depends on meeting market demand, which in turn demands increasing fulfillment rates to satisfy your customers. Achieving this goal requires optimizing your strategy with an aim toward perfect order fulfillment. 

There are many places fulfillment can be delayed – from an antiquated order acceptance process to lack of inventory to logistical complexities. Without complete visibility into your entire supply chain, you won’t be able to see where it’s failing. If you can’t find the problem, you can’t solve it. It’s an information gap that can cripple your entire business. Equip your company for growth, improve fulfillment rates, reach new levels of efficiency, and increase customer satisfaction with a truly transparent supply chain. 

A supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link 

Your customers want what they want, and they want it instantly. Same-day delivery has taken hold. Many shoppers – 49% – say that same-day delivery means they will more likely shop online. Of those aged 18 to 34 who already shop online, 56% expect same-day delivery. Another 61% say they are willing to pay more. In addition:  

  • 51% of retailers already offer same-day delivery 
  • Of the remaining 49%, 65% plan to offer it within two years 

To maintain a competitive edge, your supply chain must be able to deliver. Even among those who don’t expect same-day delivery, 80% expect same-day shipping. Many shoppers would abandon an order if they couldn’t get same-day delivery, and this applies to a number of verticals including: 

  • 22% of those who shop for apparel 
  • 24% of electronics shoppers 
  • 23% who buy food and beverages 
  • 28% who buy toys and video games 

The compound annual growth rate for same-day delivery from 2020 to 2025 is predicted to be 20.31%, or $9.82 billion. This growth rate depends on increasing customer satisfaction through speedy and efficient fulfillment rates. So just how do you get there? 

The path to customer satisfaction is transparent 

Opacity is the enemy of supply chain management. You know; you’ve been through that tense, nail-biting meeting with a customer who wants to know where their product is. You know it left the manufacturer. It’s on a ship somewhere, you guess. Or maybe it’s tied up because someone didn’t fill out some paperwork along the way.  

You check your ERP, but that’s to run your internal business, not your supply chain. You can likely see the order, and that’s it. It gives you no real-time insight into inventory, you have no real-time information at all about where your goods are in the supply chain, and you can’t tell your customer anything enlightening. You might have order management applications, some warehouse management software, and a variety of order-taking channels, but they still don’t give you what you need. 

You need a cohesive, integrated solution that offers transparency to speed up your fulfillment rates and give your customers what they want. The Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform delivers what you need to meet and exceed your strategic goals. Check out the following solutions on offer.

Automated fulfillment 

Automated order promising allows you to evaluate Available-to-Promise (ATP), Capable-to-Promise (CTP), and Profitable-to-Promise (PTP) inventory to improve customer service and model supply chain opportunities. This leverages an active digital twin of your supply chain to quickly determine the ability to fulfill a customer order. You can:

  • Achieve complete visibility into customer order status 
  • Get instant notification of incoming orders with the information you need to analyze every detail to flag and mitigate problems before they happen
  • Know inventory levels in real time so you know you whether can fulfill the order 
  • See fulfillment status in real time so, if necessary, you can adjust resourcing. 

You also gain the ability to review the final profitability of the order. By leveraging in-memory processing and robust analytics, you can make faster decisions around how to respond to an unexpected opportunity, generate incremental revenue, and provide more proactive customer service.

Inventory planning and optimization

Optimized inventory gives you a competitive advantage when it comes to increasing fulfillment rates. You can create, evaluate, and optimize your inventory strategies and tactics throughout your entire supply chain network.  

With increased visibility, you can see and consider all the interdependencies in production and distribution to avoid excesses that increase cost while making sure you have what you need to speedily fulfill orders.

Supply planning and optimization 

It’s all about a strategy that synchronizes supply and demand – even in complex distribution networks and global supply chains – ensuring the most effective allocation of resources throughout your supply chain. With the real-time information offered by the Logility platform, your planning takes place in the real world, with current supplier, transport, and other constraints. By leveraging automation, you can consider a wide variety of replenishment scenarios to meet customer demands. 

Today’s customer is increasingly demanding, with speed of delivery being a primary competitive differentiator. You can either cash in on this expanding market with a modern digital supply chain platform or sit by and ignore technological innovation at your peril. Remember Blackberry? 

Logility delivers the solutions to meet today’s demands for fast fulfillment        

Reinvent your supply chain to deliver what your customers need. Logility offers complete supply chain transparency to meet current demands and adroitly respond to changing market dynamics. By accelerating the digital sustainable supply chain, we help companies seize opportunities and more profitably manage their complex businesses. 

The Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform leverages an innovative blend of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to automate planning, accelerate cycle times, increase precision, improve operating performance, break down business silos, and deliver greater visibility. We help you make smarter decisions faster – reach out to our team to discuss our supply chain solutions. 

Success story

iNova Pharmaceuticals breaks free from the constraints of spreadsheet-based planning.

Logility helped pharmaceutical company iNova consolidate knowledge and processes across geographies and systems, improve productivity through automation and support rapid growth.

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Improved forecast accuracy

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Reduced manual PO creation through automation

Significant improvements

Safety stock modeling

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Improved forecast accuracy

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Reduced manual PO creation through automation

Significant improvements

Safety stock modeling

Challenges

iNova Pharmaceuticals develops, markets and sells a wide range of prescription medicines and non-prescription consumer health products to over 20 countries and distributors across Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Its 500+ employees deliver a product portfolio spanning weight management, cough, cold and flu, pain management, health supplements, dermatology, sun care and female health products. Since 2017, under new ownership iNova has focused on expanding its product offerings.

iNova knew that achieving its growth goals meant unifying and synchronizing its approach to supply and demand planning, sales and operations planning, and inventory management. Excel-based planning created a planning process which differs across each geography, with compromised sustainability.

“Our business is complex. In addition to accounting for widely dispersed geographies, our planning processes have to reflect and synthesize different market dynamics. For example, consumer products are promotion-sensitive and, where ranged in pharmacy, products are also driven by ranging and grading. The prescription product portfolio relies heavily on statistical forecasting – a limitation for us in the Excel environment. The different planning processes hosted in Excel was a real impediment to growth, and that problem would only have grown worse. Planning in Excel is not sustainable due to the personalized nature of the tools used,” says Rowan Seccombe, iNova’s Sales & Operations Planning Manager.

Implementing Logility’s digital supply chain platform in 2019 was an important component of the company’s growth strategy, providing a future-proof and flexible technology to underpin its expansion plans.

Problems using Excel for demand and supply planning

The company is exposed should owners of key spreadsheets depart. Inconsistent use of spreadsheets across the team inhibited adoption of best practice.

Different processes

iNova’s planning process differed based on region-specific data. No ‘one source of truth’ across planning process/systems.

Inefficient data management

Time was wasted on loading data into, and analyzing information from, disconnected solutions that existed only to compensate for functional gaps in spreadsheets.

Cumbersome safety stock management

Safety stock scenario planning was cumbersome, difficult to implement and only able to change periodically (2x per annum), leaving the business exposed to stock-outs or over-supply. Aged inventory presented challenges in terms of visibility across supply planning, also presenting risk of a stock-out.

Solutions

Before implementing the Logility platform, iNova relied on spreadsheets, integrated ERP and data warehousing, and a third-party analytics tool to plan and measure its business. All patchwork solutions are inefficient to manage, but iNova’s situation was particularly challenging given its large geographical footprint, multiple business units and rapid growth.

iNova implemented Logility’s integrated solutions for data management, demand and supply planning, replenishment planning and analytics. What was once a very fragmented and time-consuming operating framework became greatly streamlined, with cohesive planning across the business and process automation that saves planners time. Allowing the statistical forecast to operate greatly freed resource to concentrate on high-volume and volatile A-class SKUs.

“We benefited from the industry expertise at Logility, and their local partner Demand Management Systems, as well as the platform. Our implementation consultants constantly challenged us to justify and reconsider current processes, and that was healthy in the end. The implementation went quickly and wasn’t without some challenges, but we’re committed to a journey of incremental improvement and are well supported by Logility to do so,” remarks Seccombe.

Demand Planning and Optimization

Demand Planning and Optimization

Supply Planning and Optimization

Supply Planning and Optimization

Data Management

Data Management

Results

iNova has benefited across the organization following the implementation of the Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform, and now enjoys consistency in planning and reporting across all regions. This collaboration has reduced “misfires” and enhanced communication and decision-making across the entire enterprise.

Logility has also supported iNova to move away from manual processes and toward greater automation, bringing real efficiency gains to the business. For example, automating purchase order (PO) creation between the Logility platform and the ERP system resulted in a 40%   decrease in manual PO creation, making PO data maintenance far more efficient.

In addition, the Logility platform offers user-defined multi-level forecasting, a critical technique for iNova in supporting their S&OP processes as well as where the business fits within the FMCG sector. This forecasting capability saves times by automatically updating group-level forecasts when changes are made to individual SKUs, and vice versa. The ‘pyramid’ approach also aggregates demand history into logical groupings, resulting in more stable and accurate statistical forecasts. The results can then be pushed down the pyramid via a ‘fair share’ method to the item level if needed.

Using statistical models for forecasting iNova’s more stable SKUs has essentially freed up planner time to think creatively about managing more volatile SKUs. The models for the more stable SKUs reduced demand error by more than 50% and provided better methods for optimizing safety stocks.

Finally, the Logility suite of integrated solutions contains much of the functionality that previously resided in disparate tools, so time and effort spent on the disparate processes in those tools is greatly reduced.

“The flexible and configurable design of the Logility platform has greatly reduced our reliance on legacy systems and has established a trustworthy source of truth,” Seccombe states. “What’s more, the platform supports our need to manage forecasts across regions and at different hierarchical levels, such as supermarket and pharmacy distribution centers.”

The flexible and configurable design of the Logility platform has greatly reduced our reliance on legacy systems and has established a trustworthy source of truth.

Rowan Seccombe,
S&OP Manager,
iNova Pharmaceuticals

Other success stories

Success story
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MilliporeSigma

Logility helped MilliporeSigma optimize inventory via alternate sourcing and utilization of excess stock, resulting…

Don’t constrain yourself! Real-time insight and the right digital platform means more accurate forecasts.

Supply and demand. It’s a simple equation – until it’s not. The COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical events have created demand variability. This causes volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity across the supply chain. The resulting fluctuation in demand is amplified for vendors upstream in the supply chain in a phenomenon called the bullwhip effect. 

The bullwhip effect creates a demand-constrained supply chain marked by excess inventory, production planning problems, and even adversely affects customer service. So how do you manage a supply chain with demand constraints? It is, after all, a complicated balancing act with several competing priorities such as on-time and fully filled orders, achieving financial goals, and keeping things running at optimum levels. 

Supply chain stability is elusive these days, and recovery is likely to be painful – especially for companies that are unprepared to navigate current problems and lack the resilience to cope with whatever comes next. It’s time to up your supply chain planning game with software that lets you manage the supply chain instead of it managing you. 

Demand Constraints and the Problems They Cause for Businesses 

A demand-constrained supply chain is characterized by low demand and high supply. Because supply exceeds demand, all demand can be fulfilled, but there is underutilized production capacity. This is a common phenomenon in capitalism; demands are met with a bountiful supply for pretty much anything, which creates constant underutilization, even when demand is high. 

Then, there’s the issue of surplus inventory. Current volatility takes its toll, creating excess inventory, which creates a financial risk, leading to waste in many industries, particularly food and beverage, and fashion and apparel. 

Excess inventory can be created in several ways, and consumer and market trends are just part of the story.  Retail and home goods industries are especially vulnerable to these trends because of seasonality, but: 

• 60% of excess inventory can be attributed to shipping delays 

• 25% of surpluses are caused by a lack of transparency and visibility into the supply chain 

• Another 15% is caused by other issues such as quality problems and returns.  

Excess inventory has a profound impact on a company’s financial health as well as the environment, but managed effectively, it can be converted into a valuable business asset. 

How to Manage a Demand-Constrained Supply Chain 

Demand variability has always confounded inventory planning. Conventional statistical forecasting models are no longer accurate. A modern supply chain requires a responsive and agile platform that informs range forecasting, flexible contracting, and strategic multi-sourcing with solutions that give visibility into both supplier capacity and proactively manage risk.  

Lack of a proper understanding of demand means organizations can fail to meet orders and maintain a steady workflow. To be strategically effective, demand planners must leverage historical sales data and real-time supply chain visibility. 

Plan 

Your goal, of course, is to achieve that elusive balance. That takes demand planning, which means predicting the demand for your products so you can ensure you can deliver and satisfy customers without creating a surplus.  

Some best practices include: 

• Implement the right digital supply chain platform; one that has forecasting tools that can detect nuances, has robust analysis and reporting capabilities and provides transparency and visibility across the entire supply chain. This visibility will allow you to produce a more reliable forecast.  

• Collect and prepare your data with real-time visibility; pair inventory movement with reports that give you a clear picture, as well as mine and aggregate data to show areas for improvement and trigger reactions that create a more agile process. 

It’s about efficiency – with visibility into customer demands, product and material requirements, as well as what actions all stakeholders need to perform, you’ll be well equipped to meet market demand without creating surplus inventory. 

Reap the benefits of a well-managed supply chain 

Avoiding demand constraints is just one benefit of a properly managed supply chain. With the proper software, you can develop a cost-effective strategy that minimizes costs while creating happy customers, increasing profits, and boosting productivity. Supply-and-demand balance issues can be promptly addressed. In addition, your organization will realize: 

• Better collaboration with suppliers, distributors, and all supply chain stakeholders 

• Improve efficiency with exception alerts for service level exceptions 

• Automate your planning strategy 

And the big one: optimize your inventory levels so they lead to accelerated turns and reduce the amount of obsolete stock. You can automatically make sure inventory placement takes into consideration shelf-life and substitutions. Fast, sporadic, and slow-moving inventory can be managed by leveraging different safety stock methods and order policies.  

To avoid demand constraints, effective supply chain management requires the right solutions. Today’s supply chain chaos isn’t going anywhere fast, and just as no one saw a pandemic and invasion of a sovereign country in their crystal ball, who knows what will happen next? Best be prepared. 

Logility: Supply Chain Planning With No Constraints 

Don’t be left in the dark, wondering what will come next and with a bunch of excess inventory on your hands. Logility’s digital supply chain platform accelerates the sustainable digital supply chain by leveraging advanced analytics and AI to empower your business with the visibility you need to manage your entire supply chain in good times and bad. Reap the benefits of more accurate inventory planning, accelerated cycle times, improved precision, and increased operating performance.   

We help organizations sense and respond to changing market dynamics, more profitably manage their global businesses, and become resilient, sustainable enterprises. It’s time for a digital, sustainable supply chain. Reach out to our specialists today to discuss our supply chain solutions. 

Interconnected supply chain planning enables faster, more empowered decision-making.

Supply chain organizations are now caught in the clutches of a global economy creaking beneath the weight of cargo embargoes, labor shortages, jammed ports and shipping lanes, and a pandemic that continues to evolve. Factories run the risk of closing without advanced notice. Manufacturing capacity is severely diminished. Even their ability to keep up with demand is challenged by a combination of resource material shortages and shipping and receiving delays. 

While these struggles are not uncommon, functional silos are rendering current supply chain practices inefficient and cost-prohibitive to address. Sudden spikes and sharp declines in supply and demand are happening too quickly to use information that is ill-relayed, incomplete, outdated, or not received at all. 

Let’s face it ‒ the traditional supply chain model is falling short. Now more than ever, the conventional silos of planning, sourcing, and procurement teams must be connected into one cohesive network. 

What Needs to Change? 

According to Gartner analysis1, supply chain leaders should build an organization that orchestrates end-to-end planning, mitigates or resolves risks, and supports current and future business needs. This means that all roles and activities involved in the supply chain must be centralized. 

However, as Gartner noted, the definitions of the activities that should be included are unclear in most cases. For example, distribution requirement planning, capacity investments, midterm capacity planning, material requirements and replenishment planning, and product scheduling are equally shared with the finance side of procurement. 

Instead of viewing these blurred organizational boundaries as “us” versus “them,” supply chain planning leaders should increase their interconnectedness with other areas of the business, especially procurement and sourcing, to maximize performance outcomes. Doing so enables these three groups to work together seamlessly toward common objectives without ignoring other business needs. 

Achieving Interconnected Supply Chain Planning

By uniting planning, procurement, and sourcing data, analysis, and insight, every executive along the supply network is better equipped to seize new opportunities, sense and respond to changing market dynamics, and more profitably manage global complexity. This is where a digital supply chain platform can help. 

A digital supply chain platform captures and stores crucial data in real time and layers that information on top of existing processes across the enterprise. Planning teams, regardless of their organization, can leverage embedded artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation to always ensure peak operational performance. 

For example, an operations planner can dig into internal capacity data stored on the cloud ‒ without tracking down a specific spreadsheet, document, or disparate application ‒ to obtain recommendations for keeping up with demand. At the same time, the sourcing planning analyst could evaluate the same information and reconcile it to help ensure the material inventory strategy accurately reflects the production needs and expectations of the broader marketplace. The procurement specialist can also use this information to negotiate pricing and standing orders with existing or alternative vendors to optimize spending while ensuring the availability and delivery of the right components. 

A digital supply chain platform enables these interactions between planning, sourcing, and procurement ‒ as well as many other departments across the supply network ‒ to become more flexible, collaborative, and responsive. When all individuals have access to a single source of truth concurrently, planners can strategize together to ensure resources and materials are at the right place at the right time and deliver on customer expectations with little to no delay. 

Where End-to-End Continuity Matters Most 

Supply chain leaders may never be able to fully insulate their operations from disruption. But they can navigate every twist and turn with a single, unified platform like the Logility® Digital Supply Chain Platform that offers interconnected supply chain planning, sourcing, and procurement for faster, more empowered decision-making. Then, every part of the supply chain can run with a resilience that keeps competitors guessing and customers delighted ‒ from integrated business planning, product design, and demand management to inventory and supply optimization. 

Logility helps organizations sense and respond to changing market dynamics and more profitably manage their global businesses to become resilient, sustainable enterprises. It’s time for a digital, sustainable supply chain. Reach out to our specialists today to discuss our supply chain solutions.

1 Gartner, ‘Take 3 Steps Before Designing Your Supply Chain Planning Organization’ 
11 March, 2021 
Cristina Carvallo, Ken Chadwick 

Supply variability today. Where are we at? 

It’s tempting to think of supply variability as a recent phenomenon caused by COVID-19. Supply chain professionals know better. Supply disruptions are as old as trade itself. But the disruptive power of the pandemic was off the charts, as they say.  

How far off the charts? Depends on the data, of course. Let’s take a look an “index of indexes” recently devised by The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  The Global Supply Chain Pressure Index integrates commonly used measures “with an aim to provide a more comprehensive summary of potential disruptions affecting global supply chains,” the authors said in a post on the New York Fed’s website. 

Note: Index scaled by its standard deviation

The new index is comprehensive, synthesizing data from a variety of sources including the Baltic Dry Index (cost of shipping raw materials), the Harpex Index (container shipping rate changes), Purchase Manager Index surveys and data from the Institute of Supply Management’s manufacturing survey. 

Note the magnitude of the COVID disruption. The index is scaled by its own standard deviation. You’ll (perhaps) recall from stats class that in any distribution, about 95% of values will be within two standard deviations of the mean. The Pressure Index registered ~4 at times during the past two years.

Averaging across industries, companies can now expect supply chain disruptions lasting a month or longer to occur every 3.7 years, and the most severe events take a major financial toll.

McKinsey, August 2020
What’s the Smart Response to Ongoing Supply Variability? 

Supply chain professionals continue to wrestle with supply problems as we emerge from the pandemic. To address ongoing supply-side turmoil, Logility recommends: 

  1. Building and achieving a feasible plan and the importance of “what-if” analysis capabilities. It starts with defining “feasible” and establishing clarity of roles so the ‘top floor’ and the ‘shop floor’ are synchronized; 
  1. Focusing on the form and function of inventory to maximize the utility of the buffer. That means understanding inventory positions and capabilities from raw materials through semi-finished goods to in-transit finished goods; and 
  1. Ensuring adherence to the schedule, which requires understanding constraints across the entire supply network. 

This post focuses on #1 above: the importance of “what-if” scenario planning capabilities. In a single-source world, “what-if” scenario planning would be largely irrelevant. It’s true that some companies argue for a smaller number of highly competent, reliable supply partners, especially in the context of achieving sustainability goals. But few argue for single-source. The risks are too large. In fact, a growing number of businesses are ditching single-source supplier agreements to hedge against global events that disrupt supply lines.  

As a result, multi-sourcing is gaining popularity as a purchasing model. Driven by organizations that seek to mitigate risk as well as capitalize quickly on market opportunities, multi-sourcing offers clear advantages, including reduced risk of supply shocks and ongoing, healthy competition among vendors across a variety of factors like innovation, price, service level agreements (SLAs) and willingness to share risk. 

We Can’t Always Know What, But We Can Know What If?

Paraphrasing a popular Logility blog post, uncertainty isn’t a license to do nothing. We’ve entered an era in which businesses must be hyper-vigilant – anticipating risks, disruptions, and opportunities –  while on the journey to build a resilient enterprise.  

By asking “what if?” inside a data-driven framework, leaders can evaluate strategic and tactical sourcing options. Moreover, when built on a digital model – or digital ‘twin’ – of the supply chain, integrated business planning can leverage “what-if” intelligence to find the optimal balance between supply and demand, as well as risk and reward. Technology-enabled “what-if” analysis and scenario planning can provide on-demand forecasts so organizations can optimize plans as often as required. Supply chain readiness can be evaluated via real-time simulations, yielding improved visibility throughout the extended enterprise. Financial performance can also be assessed and compared against plans from multiple perspectives simultaneously. 

From Defense to Offense 

By examining the possibilities of every conceivable scenario, decision-makers can not only minimize the impact of future shocks, but discover more long-term opportunities for growth. What begins as a means to mitigate supply chain chaos becomes a method for spotting a silver lining and acting on it. This is the beauty of “what-if” analysis and scenario planning, whether in times of crisis or calm somewhat less crisis. 

Read more about the benefits of a diverse sourcing strategy here.

Smart inventory allocation and deployment starts with the right digital supply chain platform.

For most businesses, the past two years have been a much-needed teaching moment on the state of their inventory planning, tracking, and management capabilities. Decades-old, tried-and-true rules ‒ such as unit-based policies for safety stock, ABC classifications, and inventory planning based on spreadsheets ‒ are far too static, unreliable, and slow for today’s world. 

Most supply chain organizations have risen to the challenge of satisfying the basic demands of lower total landed costs while maintaining customer service levels, especially when margin pressure is high. But as marketplaces grow more complex and supply variabilities increase, staying competitive requires making the right trade-offs and working with an accurate view of the end-to-end supply chain. 

Inventory allocation and deployment optimization are tactics that many companies use to evaluate their supply chain trade-offs and mitigate the impact of supply variability. 

It's time to think about better inventory allocation and deployment

A Much-Needed Transformation is Happening Now 

Many companies today still rely on spreadsheets and legacy methodologies to optimize their inventories. It isn’t unusual for planners to use last-century solutions, even though meeting service levels and financial goals consistently is still a struggle. 

While the gap between service levels, revenue growth, and profitability has always been a low-burning concern, recent fluctuations and disruption in global supply and demand have inflamed it into a five-alarm fire. And now, all those previously reliable practices and tools are nothing more than using a garden house when a full-fledged firehouse is needed to get the job done. 

At Logility, we have seen first-hand what happens when businesses migrate away from planning inventory with error-prone Excel spreadsheets and manual, labor-intensive procurement activities and start using an integrated digital supply chain platform. Almost immediately, organizations benefit from higher visibility and process automation. For example, planning teams can focus on exceptions and value-added activities while the platform automatically releases orders into their existing ERP system ‒ leading to reduced errors and faster processing times. 

Digitalization of inventory planning is highly effective because the location of inventory, not the amount produced, often makes the biggest difference. In fact, inventory allocation and deployment across multiple locations is one of the most complex and strategic decisions that can be made. And with the right solutions, supply chain organizations can seize new opportunities by detecting and understanding normally invisible interdependencies with customer response times, transportation costs, and re-deployment costs and concerns. 

Access to predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) makes product production, placement, and delivery more strategic, timely, and impactful. For example, Tillamook County Creamery Association was able to decrease finished good inventory by 75% while increasing fill rates by 98% and saving US$4.2 million in costs normally lost from produce spoilage and obsolescence. American apparel manufacturer Haggar experienced similar outcomes, including 70% lower excess inventory and 10% lower selling, general, and administrative expenses. 

A Position of Growth Emerges from Smarter Inventory Movement 

The next time you need to make a critical inventory decision, consider whether your existing systems and processes enable you to act, react, and adapt fast enough to meet actual customer demand and current market trends. Then think about how much easier and more profitable the experience could be with flexible rules, automated workflows, and enterprise-wide insights across long- and short-term planning horizons. 

That’s the beauty of Logility’s solutions for inventory allocation and deployment. They use all those intelligent capabilities and more to help ensure product availability and high customer service, while efficiently managing inventory positions and directing products to channels and locations that best serve customer demand. Plus, you can keep up with the pace of today’s shifts in demand and supply by automating replenishment across all channels and forecasting at the SKU level to increase inventory turns and reduce markdowns.