Ebooks Archives

Download this addition to the popular eBook, Practical Tips to Improve Demand Planning. You’ll receive eight more tips to help you blend the art and science of demand planning to drive improved customer service levels, reduce costs and support profitable growth.

Wholesale distributors sit in a precarious location when it comes to supply chain risk management. They “fill the gap” between manufacturers and retail/service customers by providing access to a wide assortment of products, industry knowledge and value-added services. In this role, wholesale distributors face many of the same supply chain risk management challenges as manufacturers and retailers, including:

Product availability and time-definite delivery — having the right products when and where the customer needs them, and at the right price
Reliably supplying a broad and deep product line of complementary items, alternatives, assortments, variations and lots, nearly always consolidated from multiple, potentially competing suppliers
Consolidation and one-stop shopping
Delivery and installation
Managing substitutions for comparable or better fit, form, function, or lower price
Managing succession where technology, regulation, competition, or fashion drive rapid product life cycles

Faced with growing costs, shrinking margins, new competitors and demanding customers, wholesale distributors must turn to advanced supply chain risk management capabilities to separate themselves from the pack including:

Advanced modeling capabilities to create a valid, forward-looking demand plan by product, customer, channel and geography, with more accurate forecasts throughout the product life cycle.

Inventory optimization capabilities to examine stock positions in each stocking location and to model interrelationships between stocking locations to reduce overall inventory levels while meeting customer service requirements.

Enhanced long-range planning capabilities to enable more accurate predictions of market changes, identify and mitigate potential risks, and empower a more predictable and repeatable integrated planning process.

This eBook, Building a Profitable Wholesale Distribution Supply Chain, presents several demand-driven supply chain planning techniques to help wholesale distributors get control of costly overstocks, stockouts and expediting charges and compete from a more profitable position.

Life sciences companies face a unique set of supply chain demand planning challenges including extreme service level requirements, multi-tier distribution networks, strict regulatory requirements, a challenging inventory mix of high- and low-volume items and increasing demand uncertainty due to a rapidly changing portfolio of new products sold through new channels and new markets. This ebook highlights five capabilities every life science supply chain team must address to formulate optimized supply chain demand planning.

A heads up — the first area is embracing and managing a digital transformation. The digitization of a supply chain involves creating a detailed data and process model that mirrors the intricacies of an actual end-to-end supply chain network. Done right, this “digital twin” will have enough detail to model the information, money and product flow from acquisition of components, through production, distribution and fulfillment to the customer. The benefits of digital transformation for life sciences companies are plentiful and include:

Process Automation: Use information to automate routine process steps and free up resources to work on more value-added activities.
Continuous Planning & Optimal Response: Unleash the full capabilities of your supply chain demand planning solutions to develop game-changing competitive breakthroughs in customer service and value creation.
Advanced Analytics: Enjoy In-depth, end-to-end analysis using multiple “what if” scenarios and have information you need to head off potential risks and fully embrace opportunities.

Download this eBook today to explore in detail four additional capabilities that can help life sciences companies eliminate excess cost and inefficiencies from global supply chains while maintaining confidence in supply.

Most executives agree that the ability to use demand planning software to generate an accurate forecast has a significant impact on long-term business success. The forecast directly affects an organization’s ability to satisfy customers, manage resources and grow the business cost effectively. An improvement in forecast accuracy—even just one percent—can have a ripple effect across the business including significantly reducing inventory buffers, obsolete products, expedited shipments, distribution center space, and non-value added work. In turn, these improvements can translate into higher customer fill rates, customer satisfaction and ultimately more revenue with higher margins.

Here’s one tip without even having to download the ebook: make sure your demand planning software can take you to the next level by using machine learning. The evolution to using artificial intelligence (AI) and self-learning algorithms to accelerate supply chain planning is inevitable. In fact, there are early examples of the potential of AI to improve both supply chain planner efficiencies and provide better or optimized supply chain decisions.

The question is, “Are we, as a profession, ready to embrace Machine Learning? If so, what does that mean and how do we get there?” One way to get started with Machine Learning is to look at your Demand Planning Software capabilities. For example, a “Best-Fit” forecasting algorithm automatically switches to the most appropriate forecasting method based on the latest demand information, ensuring you create the best forecast for every product at every stage of its life cycle. The algorithm evaluates forecast error each forecasting cycle and recommends or automatically selects the forecasting method that will produce the best forecast. “Best-Fit” forecasting is a basic form of Machine Learning.

This eBook, Practical Tips to Improve Demand Planning, provides sound advice to put your demand planning software to the best use for your company.

Consumer products companies must balance efficient operations while finding new ways to drive innovation using supply chain management services. As part of this this process, inventory is a continual focal point for senior management teams due to its visibility in financial reporting. The ability to keep inventory in the right place to improve cash flow and provide better responsiveness to changing customer demands is key. This eBook outlines how the right supply chain management services can help reduce inventory, improve forecast accuracy, decrease inventory obsolescence and more.

In addition to inventory, supply chain teams at consumer products companies must evolve to take advantage of advanced planning capabilities like native language interfaces, algorithmic planning, artificial intelligence and big data in order to optimize their supply chains globally while having the capabilities to act locally. To support corporate goals of profitable revenue growth, supply chain organizations must also place a greater emphasis on the customer and measure performance based on customer experience. And we should never forget, the ability to develop accurate forecasts throughout a product’s life cycle is always critical to both top- and bottom-line performance.

Download this eBook, Building the Consumer Products Supply Chain of the Future, to better understand the importance of building a strong supply chain management services foundation, based on planning and optimization, so consumer products companies can meet current and future goals. It also provides examples of how to build these capabilities at your company and have integrated, global, high quality supply chain data; clearer supply chain visibility; and a holistic approach to optimizing supply chain capabilities.