To establish a firm foundation for success, food and beverage companies must implement solutions that use supply chain artificial intelligence. As a food manufacturer, you face a big list of tough supply chain challenges including long raw material lead times, volatile commodity price fluctuations, safety and quality issues, demand uncertainty and seasonality, high promotional activity, product perishability, frequent new product introductions (NPIs), exacting distribution requirements, complex manufacturing constraints, strict legal and regulatory requirements, and increasing customer expectations.
Despite the long list of supply chain challenges food companies face, there is good news. Automation through supply chain artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are here to help. A convergence of people, process, data, and technology capabilities, including those listed below, makes the timing ripe to take your food and beverage supply chain to the next level.
- Automation through artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities
- More mature and user friendly supply chain planning and optimization solutions
- Proven supply chain optimization algorithms
- Access to richer internal and external structured and unstructured data
- Technology savvy workforce—Millennials/Generation Z
Attaining superior supply chain artificial intelligence and optimization capabilities has become a necessity for survival for food and beverage companies in today’s highly competitive global environment. Food and beverage companies need to build a strong foundation of supply chain capabilities today to be in a position to take advantage of more mature capabilities.
Part One of this white paper presents the capabilities required to build a strong digital supply chain planning foundation, including leveraging mature and user friendly supply chain planning and optimization solutions to make faster, more informed decisions. Part Two covers the next steps food and beverage companies should take to reap the greatest harvest from supply chain investments.
Most companies recognize the importance to improve forecast accuracy and have a repeatable, reliable demand forecasting process. Accurate forecasts help minimize inventory, maximize production efficiency, streamline purchasing, optimize distribution, maximize customer service and ensure confidence in company projections. However, developing accurate product forecasts at all stages of a product’s life cycle can be very challenging. Gartner places demand forecasts at the top of their Hierarchy of Supply Chain Metrics to highlight its impact back through the supply chain. After all, a forecast is not simply a projection of future business; it is a request for product and resources that ultimately impacts almost every business decision the company makes across sales, finance, production management, logistics and marketing.
Typically, a variety of demand forecasting methods are applicable to any particular type of supply chain scenario. Smart supply chain planners use multiple methods tuned to perform well at different phases of the product life cycle, chosen to best exploit the available historical data and degree of market knowledge. The key is to pick the most effective and flexible methods and models, blend their best features, and shift between them as needed to keep forecast accuracy at its peak.
In this updated white paper, 2020 Planning Tip: Eight Methods to Improve Forecast Accuracy, we take a brief look at the three categories of demand forecasting models and the eight methods that have produced superior results for Logility’s many clients in a variety of industries and market conditions around the world. We also discuss how Multi-Variate Demand Signal Management can help you incorporate internal and external demand data to improve forecast quality and uncover insights to make better and faster decisions.
Retailers are under tremendous pressure to be more agile and responsive, which requires faster product development, production and distribution from concept to customer to meet accelerated expectations. This white paper from Retail TouchPoints delivers five proven strategies to help retailers find true concept to customer success.
Early adopters of AI strategy have enjoyed profit margins greater than 5%. Today, retailers can leverage powerful interactive visualizations, machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their supply chain management efforts to join this elite group. This white paper from Retail TouchPoints helps retailers navigate the next steps towards powering their digital transformation and overcome four common challenges facing retail today.
Retail demand planning in the past has allowed companies to experience great successes, and continues to prove importance in today’s market. Retailers enjoyed the best holiday season in years in 2017, but the success did not extend to all fashion retailers. While retail sales were up 5.5%, apparel sales grew by only 2.7% overall, a lackluster increase compared to the rest of the industry. There were clear gaps between the winners and losers in apparel and fashion sales, as department stores continued to lose ground to fast-fashion companies and innovative fashion brands.
What separates the winners from the losers? In part, it’s the ability to harness the power of real-time sales data to understand the latest trends and respond to rapidly shifting demand signals. Retail demand planning is key for winning companies to be able to do two things:
- Quickly get the right products to the consumers who want to buy them
- Quickly get out of the products that are not selling
To do this, companies must embrace a digital future, as the supply chain models of the past aren’t adequate in today’s real-time world. The industry’s most successful companies are adopting a digital supply chain that shares information across their entire organization and enables them to deliver the products their customers want, every time, driving full price sales and minimizing markdowns and stockouts. Companies such as Zara, H&M, Xcel Brands and others exemplify the trend toward a digital supply chain with retail demand planning capabilities, and other fashion companies are scrambling to catch up.
But what exactly is the digital supply chain, and what advantages can it bring to your company? In order to understand this, it’s important to look at its current and future state.
This white paper outlines why most successful apparel and fashion companies are adopting a digital supply chain, one that shares information and enables the delivery of the products their customers want, every time, driving full-price sales and minimizing markdowns and stockouts.
Building robust supply chain analytics capabilities is more important than ever.
Economic pressures including rising fuel costs, global expansion, off-shore low cost competition, and tight manufacturing capacities continue to stretch a supply chain team’s ability to reduce costs while meeting ever-increasing customer expectations. To complicate matters, finding and retaining qualified supply chain talent continues to be an issue. Top supply chain talent tends to migrate to companies that have invested in modern solutions that allow users to spend their time creating value versus shifting through spreadsheets to format, align, validate and report on last week’s data.
Supply chain analytics is the application of mathematics, statistics, predictive modeling and machine-learning techniques to find meaningful patterns in the vast mountains of data produced by enterprise systems and external sources. Tapping into both structured and unstructured data sources, advanced analytics help you draw conclusions about your demand, inventory, production and distribution operations to quickly drive more informed business decisions. An important goal of a supply chain analytics initiative is to enable better business decisions that improve operating results and allow you to be more responsive to customer needs.
Interest in supply chain analytics continues to grow at an exponential rate. Research has shown a strong correlation between more advanced analytics and higher Return
on Investment (ROI). Higher analytics maturity levels often lead to improved product quality, increased revenues and service levels while decreasing inventory.
This white paper dives into the importance of building robust supply chain analytics capabilities to support profitable revenue growth and exceptional customer service, and offers three easy-to-use checklists to help get you started.
Lack of visibility across the supply chain can stop even the most innovative omnichannel retailers from getting the right merchandise to the right customer in the right place at the right time. Retail winners have a clear planning advantage. They have adopted solutions that transform their integrated retail planning function from an operational discipline into a strategy engine that drives growth. This white paper, written by Retail TouchPoints, outlines five steps that will help retailers become more agile and responsive to fast-changing consumer trends through more effective merchandise planning, assortment, allocation and replenishment.
You can make your S&OP process pay off for your company — here’s how:
Research abounds on the benefits of developing a productive S&OP process. It is one of the most discussed and written-about topics in the world of supply chain management. In countless surveys conducted by industry analyst firms, a solid S&OP process consistently ranks as one of the top three priorities for management teams.
Implementing an S&OP process and seeing it to full maturity takes time – there are no quick fixes or short cuts. Executives want to implement an S&OP process because the benefits are tangible. Best-in-class companies report consistent, repeatable performance
after implementing S&OP processes, and predictability is all-important.
S&OP, in its long form – sales and operations planning – is the decision process used to match a company’s demand to supply, and align its supply chain plans to its business strategy. For many management teams, S&OP initiatives are agents of change that can dramatically reduce costs while improving customer service. However, there is still a wide gap between a best-in-class and the typical S&OP process in place today. Many companies find it difficult to push past the challenges preventing them from achieving a highly effective S&OP process and realizing the associated benefits.
A typical S&OP process flow looks like this:
- Innovation & Strategy Review
- Demand Review
- Supply Review
- Financial Integration
- Executive Business Review
Download this white paper today to get more details, including solutions to many of the common challenges, and how to overcome them and maximize your S&OP success.
For retailers, shifting the business to support the new consumer requires adopting an omnichannel approach. But making that shift is challenging — particularly with a merchandising and supply chain infrastructure that is siloed and lacks data transparency. In an era when speed and responsiveness are table stakes, an integrated platform is a business basic for any retail organization that calls itself truly omnichannel. This white paper outlines the benefits of a broad integrated technology platform and the need to reevaluate organizational structures and processes so retailers can create the flexible, customer-centric, omnichannel-capable supply chains required to serve today’s empowered consumers.
Integrated Business Planning (IBP) distills complex, cumbersome and disconnected tasks into a single integrated process that streamlines and unites planning activities to produce better business decisions. Combining data from sales, marketing, production, procurement, transportation and finance, IBP creates one powerful planning framework by removing organizational and technology barriers and aligning and synchronizing plans across strategic and tactical time horizons.
Thousands of companies of all sizes and types have reduced costs, improved service and gained a competitive advantage through IBP. But when companies reach a plateau in their S&OP process maturity, they face the risk of stalling business growth. At this point it’s important to embrace integrated business planning, which synchronizes strategic and operational planning. Combining data from sales, marketing, production, procurement, transportation and finance, IBP creates one powerful decision framework for stakeholders by removing organizational and technology barriers and aligning and synchronizing plans across strategic and tactical time horizons.
IBP can drive greater incremental value for your business by:
- Enabling high quality business decisions that deliver more bang for the buck
- Encompassing today’s multitude of functions, geographies, units, channels, etc.
- Enhancing the feasibility of long-range plans
This white paper describes how to use Integrated Business Planning to drive incremental business value by delivering more “bang for the buck;” analyzing a multitude of functions, geographies, units, channels, etc.; and enhancing the feasibility of long-range plans.