solutions for your industry consumer electronics

Demand Volatility and Rapid Product Innovation Define the Market

The pace of product innovation in the consumer electronics market is at unprecedented levels. While, in the 1990's, technology aficionados followed the personal computer industry to understand the latest trends, today they follow consumer electronics. Global markets are booming — from Europe to Asia to India — and global competitors are everywhere. New products are being introduced and old ones obsolete in record time as new capabilities are added and consumers clamor for the latest hot innovations.

Consumers also have more ways to shop and compare alternatives. In most cases, brand loyalty has been replaced by brand competition as highly intelligent consumers know precisely what they want and what they are willing to pay. If you're unable to meet their needs at the point of decision, you will miss out.

There are many more customers and many more locations to which the product needs to be distributed. Statistical forecasting, replenishment, and inventory optimization are increasingly important, as is real-time order promising.

Consumer electronics manufacturers today need to be able to develop accurate plans, but be poised to deal with the inevitable reality that their plans will rarely be right. To thrive in today's cut-throat environment, consumer electronics manufacturers must be in a position to constantly monitor the state of their business and supply chain, and be able to react quickly and decisively to plan deviations that threaten their market position and operations performance.

Getting the Right Product to the Right Place at the Right Time

Consumer electronics manufacturers have entered a new era of surprise and compromise requiring collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning, monitoring and response to change. The days of black box optimization-based demand planning and supply chain planning have been replaced by a need to embrace human judgment to determine the right course corrections when faced with frequent unplanned events.

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ delivers consumer electronics manufacturers the capabilities they need to compete in today's market. RapidResponse breaks down the traditional silos that have separated demand planning and supply chain planning into discrete and sequential processes. RapidResponse integrates demand, supply and product information into a single solution, ensuring that critical interactions between them are exposed and manageable. This fosters proactive supply chain visibility, demand management, supply management, sales and operations planning (S&OP) and supply chain risk management.

• RapidResponse starts by delivering supply chain visibility to all key stakeholders in your organization.
• Armed with a single view of the truth, your supply chain professionals have the insights they need to know precisely where your business is at any time and when demand and supply misalignments are posing a problem.
• RapidResponse fosters collaborative action to deal with misalignments, providing a collaborative simulation environment to empower your action teams to identify and analyze resolution options to deal with unplanned events.
• And, RapidResponse provides integrated scorecarding capabilities to ensure your team is making informed decisions that are aligned with corporate objectives.

Success Stories

• Global response to promotion-based inquiries from wireless carriers completed in 2 hours instead of 4 days
  — mobile communications solutions and services provider
• Takes only a couple of seconds to generate production planning, compared to the 3 hours it took with previous planning system
  — multi-billion dollar international manufacturer and marketer of advanced electronic products
• Reduced projected obsolete inventory as a result of product phase-out by 99% — avoiding almost $800,000 in stranded inventory
  — producer of user-friendly ICT products and group collaboration tools