RapidResponse AlwaysOn Analytics: Powering Rapid Planning and Response

Invisible to the user, RapidResponse® AlwaysOn Analytics™ embedded directly within RapidResponse display the impact of simulated changes in seconds without having to rely on custom applications and reports. The result is instant impact analysis and the ability to identify the full impact of supply chain management decisions prior to execution.

Allotment Overrides

RapidResponse typically allocates supplies to demands based on demand due date, demand priority and whether fair share or equal share logic is required. Allotment Overrides allows planners to manually override those allocations in situations where other business rules require that available supply gets reserved for specific demands.

Alternate BOM

A part can support more than one bill of materials (BOM). This option supports functionality available in SAP, and allows RapidResponse to accurately simulate SAP results.

Available-to-Promise (ATP)

Provides traditional Available-to-Promise calculation on forecast items. This analytic calculates unconsumed forecast for a given period, for a given part, and show that quantity as available.

Capable-to-Promise (CTP)

Provides a realistic order completion date that considers component availability and capacity throughout the supply chain.

Capacity Analysis

Mimics traditional ERP capacity resource planning (CRP) and helps identify work centers that are over or under utilized, manage resource loading, and balance demand with the most efficient resource utilization over a period of time.

Co-product and By-product Planning:

Plans coincident co-product or by-product supply associated with planned orders of primary parts. Especially useful for environments where there is significant variability in the performance or physical characteristics of the output of a single manufacturing process which is often the case in the semi-conductor industry.

Constraint Manager

Allows users to easily define rate-based capacity constraints of various types (for example, production line and supply on allocation) in order to produce more realistic and achievable manufacturing dates. For parts with multiple sources, Constraint Manager can optimize source selection based on cost, priority, and allocation rules. This powerful analytic provides realistic results by simulating and evaluating the impact of constraints on operating plans.

Cumulative Lead Time

Analyses the full bill of material to calculate the cumulative lead time required to build the current part.

Financial Analysis

Allows for more informed business decisions relating to the cost of products sold. There are two types of financial planning calculations: Projected Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) and Standard Cost Roll-Up. Projected COGS calculations determine the anticipated manufacturing cost of a group of orders considering things such as actual cost from purchase orders, source dependent manufacturing costs. Standard Cost Roll-Up provides the ability to project the standard cost of an assembly or end item for any future date, considering things such as part source changes, bill structure changes and component part cost changes.

Forecast Consumption

Takes various parameters to determine how forecast gets consumed by customer orders, and produces a time phased unconsumed forecast table.

RapidResponse allows configuration of forecast consumption options enabling you to align to your host system.

When using the RapidResponse Inventory Pool module, an optional setting allows customer orders to consume from the common forecast pool in cases where actual demands from that customer are left over once their forecast pool has been completely consumed. Calculated fields report the actual demand consumed from the customer's forecast pool and from the common forecast pool.
Forecast consumption can be configured so that a demand order consumes forward from the start of the forecast interval, or backward from end of the forecast interval.
Settings allow for forecast consumption to be performed in alternating back and forth calendar intervals beginning from the customer order date, or to consume forecast in the customer order's forecast interval before consuming forecast in other intervals.
In an MPS configuration, forecasts can be placed directly on the MPS part in addition to the MPSConfig part. In this case, actual demands for an MPS part will first consume its own forecast, before consuming from the MPSConfig part. For example, if using inventory pooling to enable forecast consumption by customer, customer-specific forecast might be placed on the MPS part, and common forecast placed on the MPSConfig part.

Full-Level Pegging

Identifies independent demands associated with any supply order for any part, allowing users to determine which customer orders might be impacted by changes in supply availability.

Incremental Availability

Determines the best available date for a partial shipment. Allows order splitting based on the availability of component materials (previously order splitting was only allowed based upon constraint availability). This makes it possible to see the different dates at which parts of a supply could become available, and in particular can be used to provide better information on when portions of a late customer order can be satisfied.

Interchangeable parts

Parts can be used interchangeably. This allows you to define groups of parts with similar technical properties, and to satisfy demands with any part in the interchangeable group.

Each group of interchangeable parts consists of a primary part, which is used for all planned orders and provides the control settings for the group, and alternate parts, which can be used in place of either the primary part or other alternate parts in netting and CTP calculations. This can also used to enable global use to exhaust functionality

Inventory Pooling

Enables effective management of different pools of inventory, while considering strict customer or contract-related commitments and guidelines. For example, it can be used to prevent intermingling inventories for the same parts that are associated with different customers, contracts, or projects.

Inventory Transfers

Supports transferring nettable on-hand inventory from one site to another. This includes support for modeling the shipping lead time and cost associated with an inventory transfer and, depending on the control settings used, RapidResponse analytics will decrease the on-hand quantity at the site supplying the transfer and create a new supply at the destination site.

Kanban support in netting and capable-to-promise calculations

An option allows for Kanban parameters to be respected in netting and capable-to- promise calculations. This ensures that planned orders for a part is created to match the current approved bin size, and also that the total net supply does not exceed the product of the current approved bin size and current approved bin quantity.

Material Expiry

Supply-demand balancing considers expiry dates of supplies and minimum shelf life requirements of demands. This logic is especially relevant in the pharmaceutical industry.

Model-Unit Effectivity

Mimics typical ERP model and unit effectivity logic. With Model-Unit Effectivity enabled, RapidResponse respects model and unit effectivity during netting. The MUE analytic is typically used in an environment where customer demand can change quickly, and products can easily be reconfigured. Model and unit effectivity can be used individually, or together. The model effectivity logic is used in situations where several variants of a common part are made. The unit effectivity logic is used to improve service to customers with highly configurable end units, such as those in the aerospace and defense industries.

MRP (Netting and Explosion)

Emulates those found in common MRP and ERP systems, including the calculation of a part's netting, explosion, and phantom processing.

Multi-Site

Allows for inter-site planning and analysis in an integrated environment and the transfer of supply and demand data across multiple site types, such as plants, distribution centers, and warehouses.

Ship sets and whole order availability analysis

Independent demands from a given demand order that ship together is identified as a ship set. This enables availability analysis at the whole order level.

Supply Allocation

Order (demand) priorities can be used to specify how supplies are allocated to demands in a period (i.e. higher-priority demands are allocated supplies before lower-priority demands) through all levels of the bill of material and extended supply chain. Supplies can be allocated on a fair share or equal share basis. This allows you to ensure some on time supply is allocated to every demand in a period, either with more supply allocated to larger demands (fair share) or the same amount allocated to every demand (equal share). Manual supply allocations can be made to reserve limited supply between demand and supply sites (demand sites are typically distribution centers). These manual allocations may, optionally, be processed by analytic calculations.

Time-phased pricing support

Supports time-phased pricing on demand orders (by customer and part number).