Supply Chain Planning - System Design

Supply Chain Planning

You have a supply chain planning problem. There is too much of the wrong inventory and capacity, not enough of the right ones. Your ERP system has some of the data you need but does not have the right functionality. You are left with a manual process, disconnected spreadsheets and cannot respond fast enough to changes in demand across all your products and components.

I have a methodology for developing supply chain planning systems. It requires no software licence, no coding and works with the technology you already have. I will design a solution with you and show how to build it yourself. Or I can build it for you.

An effective planning process is automated to the rules you choose. 80% of the planning work is based on regular, repeatable calculations. The system does this at the click of a button. This leaves planners free to work on the 20% and make the decisions that you rely on professionals to do.

Our process for delivering supply chain planning systems is: DESIGN >> BUILD >> DEPLOY >> IMPROVE.

This service goes through the DESIGN step and helps you sketch out a solution: Set the desired functionality, define input data, the logic and the output reports. We can even build rapid prototypes to test our design with real-life data.

The aim is to get some results in hours and days, rather than weeks, months and years that it takes to implement software.

Start small, book an hour and see for yourself how fast we can go.

FAQs

It depends on the scope and the scale of the problem you wish to solve. We encourage you to start with a small, well-defined problem and we can make progress in 2-3 hours. Past experience has 80% of projects receiving a completed system for $5,000 - $20,000.

Yes, this is important. It is likely that your ERP is more of a transactional system rather than a planning system. Those transactions - inventory, sales orders, purchase orders - and master data are essential inputs. Essential for planning, but not sufficient. If the input data that we need already exist in a system (and most will) then we will want to pull them, not duplicate them. I recommend that we create live connections to the data, not static exports or cut-and-paste.

Yes, Excel is a technology that every supply chain company already has. We offer you a no-code way to develop systems and Excel is the best way to provide familiarity and flexibility to develop a system that fits your process. I would imagine that you are trying to move away from bad spreadsheets. We will use a systems development method that applies discipline and rigour to the way you handle data in spreadsheets. All Excel-based systems connect to data and perform data processing. We do not advocate storing data in spreadsheets.