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Evolving from Business Intelligence to Business Value
By KinaxisPure business intelligence (BI) tools suffer from two major drawbacks that prevent them from providing greater value and therefore obtaining greater adoption: They cannot identify causality and, as a consequence, they cannot provide a prediction of future performance. The promise of real-time operational BI that goes beyond the capturing of static data snapshots and enables users to identify and analyze risks and events, is of major interest to supply chain management (SCM) managers. Driven to improve operations performance, supply chain managers know that better information about their operations and processes lead to better decisions and better supply chain performance. This paper highlights what's at the heart of evolving business intelligence into business value.
7 Success Factors for Today's Supply Chain Projects
By KinaxisIn today's economic climate, no manufacturer can afford to fund any supply chain management (SCM) project that fails to deliver results. Fortunately, some best practices exist to guide companies through these projects and increase the chances of success. This white paper describes seven success factors for today's SCM projects, which have been identified by seasoned executives with decades of experience in the field.
Carbon Footprint Planning Capabilities Across the Supply Chain
By KinaxisCarbon is challenging business in many ways and customers, investors and other stakeholders are paying very close attention to how the challenge is met. Those that react well to the challenge will be seen as innovators and will be rewarded; others will fall behind and risk becoming an afterthought or worse.
This paper provides a brief exploration of the current carbon landscape and will outline the attributes of an ideal set of supply chain carbon management tools.
Five Ways Your Procurement Could Be Leaving Money On The Table
By KinaxisEnterprises that provide their strategic procurement teams with proper tools can expect them to deliver year-over-year cost savings, close to 10 times their expenses.
This white paper
- lists five key pieces of intelligence that enable more effective supply management and procurement planning
- describes a real-life negotiation in which superior supply chain visibility and collaboration helped minimize a dramatic price hike attempted by a supplier
- presents a recent analyst's report that confirms the value of strategic procurement, and describes several key characteristics of the top-performing teams… especially how they exploit technology to gather this strategic intelligence and avoid leaving money on the table.
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As companies outsource their manufacturing operations, they increase the number of tiers in the supply chain, greatly reducing their supply chain visibility and making them dependent on remote suppliers for operations performance results. To be truly effective, supplier collaboration needs to go far beyond the tactical exchange of data. Key suppliers must be brought into the decision-making process, so that brand owners can exchange early warnings and help resolve supply chain risk issues.
This paper discusses the value of a closer and more collaborative relationship with key suppliers and what is required to make that happen.
One-to-Many: Establishing a common platform to address multiple supply chain applications
By KinaxisWhat is needed in today's dispersed and loosely coupled supply chains are more collaboration, and less control; more coordination, and less optimization. Companies must have the ability to enable their front-line people to use their judgment to make fact based decisions which address the surprise and compromise inherent in today's global and multi-tier supply chains. At the heart of delivering these capabilities is the technical architecture of the supply chain solutions.
This paper describes the integrated set of capabilities that is required to satisfy the business needs of the 21st century supply chain.
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Regardless of the markets served, most producers have a common need: to respond and adapt to changes in the marketplace faster than their competition does. By adopting Lean order management and fulfillment processes, a business gains superior operations performance and flexibility; thus increasing their competitive edge.
Since actual manufacturing and material lead-times are typically a small portion of total cycle time, reducing non-production administrative processes that have long cycle times can provide the most immediate impact.
Demand Planning: How to Reduce the Risk and Impact of Inaccurate Demand Forecasts
By KinaxisAs a general rule, forecasts are always inaccurate. This paper discusses two approaches which can be used to reduce the risk and impact of inaccurate demand forecasts:
- Collaboration between customers and suppliers to improve the accuracy of the forecast.
- Quicker response to demand changes to reduce the cost of forecast error.
By improving your demand planning and demand management processes, your organization can improve customer service (by being more responsive) as well as operations performance (by achieving inventory reductions).
How CIOs Can Improve Supply Chain Management, Even with a Tight IT Budget
By KinaxisNearly all CIOs today are under pressure to contain costs, yet many enterprises need better systems, not cutbacks. How can you do both?
Right now is an ideal time for CIOs to make careful investments in key areas that wring better business results from smaller IT budgets. Given the limitations of software now being used for sales and operations planning —spreadsheets, ERP, and legacy planning— this paper looks at one way CIOs can roll out significantly more powerful supply chain management functions at an affordable cost by extending existing systems with specialized software delivered as a service (SaaS).
Inventory Management: Inventory Rationalization and Right Sizing Strategies
By KinaxisWhen examining the crucial factors that are influencing operations performance during these tough economic times, inventory exposure is a topic raised frequently.
Appropriately rationalizing your company's inventory management strategies is of vital importance to business performance. Too much inventory, or inventory which is poorly positioned, can result in impacts on cost and cash flow that can be potentially fatal in the current business climate. The goal of an appropriate inventory strategy is to ensure that you can maximize your opportunities in the market place with as little inventory as possible. This takes a clear understanding of the various factors that should be considered including product positioning, demand volatility and supply chain disruption risks.
Achieving Better Service and Profitability with More Advanced Forms of S&OP
By ARC Advisory GroupBetter service (a top driver for many companies) would be very difficult to achieve without a robust sales and operations planning (S&OP) process focused on better internal and external collaboration with the goal of more effectively balancing supply with demand. This paper explores the evolving S&OP process and discusses the specific capabilities executives are looking for in their supply chain planning and demand planning solutions.
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This white paper gives IT directors the inside track on how to adapt their supply chain to meet both the operations performance and IT challenges of the modern supply chain. It presents five powerful "secrets" that can help you move on from the linear tactics of the past, and take concrete steps toward a dynamic future and a more ideal supply chain solution for the 21st century.
Structuring the Outsourced Supply Chain Data Model: 10 Critical Data Issues to Consider
By KinaxisIncreasing supply chain complexity (as a result of outsourced manufacturing operations) is driving the requirement for more complex supply chain planning data models. Learn about ten critical data issues that need to be considered when structuring a supply chain model for maximum utility. This paper covers capturing core data from partners, modeling contractual terms, and simulating supply alternative strategies.
Creating a robust data model that can best deliver a real time supply chain will drive superior operations performance and customer service. Is that not a strategic necessity in today's unforgiving business environment?
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This white paper gives Supply Chain Managers the inside track on how to modernize their supply chain to meet the operations performance challenges of the 21st century. It presents five powerful "secrets" that can help you move on from the linear supply chain tactics of the past, and take concrete steps toward a more dynamic future. Learn the secrets and even take a survey to grade your sales and operations planning (S&OP) maturity.
Essential Characteristics of a Supply Chain Risk Management Strategy
By KinaxisToday's leaner, global supply chains have become so vulnerable that many companies are incorporating supply chain risk management as a critical part of their business strategy. Proactive risk assessment and mitigation planning are no longer enough. Timely detection of unplanned events, collaborative analysis tools, alternative scenario comparisons, and fast, appropriate response are also required to avoid disastrous consequences from unanticipated disruptions in complex supply chains. An effective supply chain risk management strategy is an ongoing process and needs the support of robust tools that will enable you to:
- Assess risks such as political/financial instability, demand volatility, and severe weather
- Visualize and evaluate mitigation and response scenarios, respecting corporate goals
- Monitor situations and promptly alert staff when unexpected events require a response
- Determine appropriate actions and their consequences across the entire supply chain
- Respond quickly to events such as unanticipated supply disruptions—before it's too late
Download this white paper to fully understand the capabilities you need to effectively address both sides of supply chain risk management—mitigation and response.
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The challenges of global supply chain management (SCM) have never been greater. Increased outsourcing, shrinking product lifecycles, intensifying economic pressures, and constant changes in supply, demand, and product make supply chain optimization harder than ever. Existing systems generate plans that become obsolete the moment they're finished, while spreadsheets and ad hoc databases lack the visibility and collaborative capabilities organizations need to swiftly and effectively monitor and respond to change. Yet today's on-demand supply chain management solutions offer new promise in enabling companies to:
- Understand opportunity and rapidly conduct risk trade-off and response
- Quickly and accurately analyze the impacts of proposed SCM solutions
- Manage external relationships and respond to unplanned events
- Give multiple users a single, real-time version of the truth
- Meet operations performance goals without overtaxing IT resources
Download this white paper to learn how on-demand supply chain management software can help you gain these benefits—and how to choose the right SCM solution for your business.
Why You Need to Re-evaluate Your Approach to Supply Chain Planning
By Kinaxis™The supply chain planning approach developed in the early 1990's is failing under today's market pressures. Today's environment requires more collaboration than control; more coordination than optimization. Demand and supply chain planning, monitoring and response needs to be performed by many users, on an ad hoc basis, as events occur. A new supply chain planning paradigm is required.
Four Capabilities Required for 21st Century Sales and Operations Planning
By KinaxisOperations performance is seriously challenged by today's dynamic, global manufacturing environment. Multi-tier supply chains require more than good planning and accurate forecasts to meet corporate performance management goals. Even small supply chain disruptions can trigger a domino effect, threatening customer loyalty and enterprise profitability. Adding real-time performance monitoring and alerts can keep your staff responsive to unplanned events and keep operations aligned with business strategies and key performance indicators (KPIs). Managing operations performance has never been more critical. You need a solution that provides:
- Profit-based S&OP that meets both departmental and overall business goals
- A balanced scorecard using both operational and financial KPIs to inform decisions
- Supply chain visibility and data integration across multiple enterprise levels
- Collaborative scenario analysis so you can select the most profitable strategy
- Performance monitoring and alerting to enable swift response to unplanned events
Download this white paper to learn why you need best-in-class S&OP to improve your organization's corporate performance management in manufacturing for the 21st century.
Enabling Sales and Operations Planning with RapidResponse
By KinaxisSales and Operations Planning organizations that leverage demand-supply planning, monitoring, and collaborative response solutions are finding themselves better equipped to power a world class S&OP process. Key capabilities include; scenario management, expressing the results of scenarios as financial measures, early alerting to consequences of decisions made elsewhere in the supply chain, and focusing users on the exceptions that require their attention.
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For today's manufacturers volatility and poor visibility contribute to demand and supply imbalances on a daily basis. The challenge is in finding the formula for rapid and intelligent responses to constant, unexpected exceptions. Learn how, by investing in a Response Management solution, two global companies were able to improve forecast effectiveness and volatility management, increase visibility, and still meet customer demand.
Leveraging Response Management in a Super-Charged Environment
By KinaxisResearch In Motion (RIM) Limited, maker of the BlackBerry®, is a Canadian company experiencing massive growth in volume output, staffing, and manufacturing infrastructure. The combined pressures of a rapidly expanding customer base and shortened product lifecycles have led the company to add more contract manufacturers to the supply chain, which means that more complex decisions need to be made in less time. Existing software was not up to the challenge, so the implementation of a new decision support tool was essential to keep RIM positioned as a market leader.
Achieving Supply Chain Visibility: There is More than Meets the Eye
By KinaxisThough everyone agrees on the importance of supply chain visibility, achieving it is only one step in solving the core problem manufacturers face: the need to respond quickly and effectively to constant change. Most "visibility" solutions focus only on finite business areas, leaving companies unable to efficiently handle the last-minute shifts so common in today's volatile and highly outsourced supply networks. Because of this, industry leaders are moving beyond mere supply chain visibility tools to capabilities and technologies that help companies:
- Leverage supply chain visibility across a complex multi-enterprise environment
- Support brand manager, CM, and supplier collaboration to avoid the "bullwhip effect" often caused by frequent changes
- Empower front-line staff to consolidate, modify, and analyze data and work together to choose the best solutions
- Drive fast, effective real time supply chain event management
- Reduce inventory, lower operating costs, and meet aggressive customer demands
Download this white paper to learn how you can transcend supply chain visibility to create a more responsive, efficient supply network and achieve greater business success.
Response Management for the Next Wave of Outsourced Manufacturing
By Technology Forecasters IncSupply chain disruptions are a way of life for many companies that have made the decision to outsource their manufacturing to factories located in geographic regions where labor costs are low. Furthermore, the old methods for compensating supply chain disruptions — with inventory buffers and forecast speculation — are being eliminated by process improvement initiatives and profitability pressures.
Beyond Supply Chain Visibility: Response Management is the Key
By Nari Viswanathan, Aberdeen Group
Supply chain visibility ranks as one of the top two application focus areas for companies as part of their supply chain technology investment plans. The ability to respond to change rapidly is emerging as critical to a company's success. Just having visibility is not enough to manage this constant change. This research brief outlines the key characteristics of solutions that go beyond visibility toward enabling a flexible Response Management capability.Charting a New Course
By Charlie Barnhart, Technology Forecasters
The macro trends of the electronics industry are clear; lower prices, higher performance, mass customization and shorter life-cycles. All of which drives companies to outsource more activities, more often, to more regionally remote geographies than ever before. Doesn't matter if it's a consumer or a commercial product, large volume or small, a significant percentage of global outsourcing is being serviced from China today and will be from some even lower-cost region (India?) tomorrow. But does moving manufacturing to these low cost labor regions automatically mean a lower total cost of ownership?-
Modern manufacturers can no longer use inventory as an accurate measure of business performance. Because problems typically arise only after inventory is already on hand—and because today's decentralized, outsourced supply chains make true inventory levels increasingly hard to discern—measuring inventory exposure is a much more effective approach. By calculating exposure related to lead time, customer demand and commitments, and the process of transforming materials to products, businesses can correctly assess inventory risk, and minimize exposure through:- Faster, better responses to supplier problems, delivery delays, and inaccurate forecasts
- Greater flexibility to handle last-minute shifts in customer demand
- Tighter inventory control through end-to-end visibility of market dynamics across the supply chain
- Immediate identification of top-priority challenges to drive inventory reductions
- Clarity about impacts of proposed inventory management changes in each business area
Download this white paper to see how to better assess and reduce inventory risk, improve customer responsiveness, and enhance your market position.
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The trend is clear—OEMs continue to outsource more functions, more often, to more geographically remote locations than ever before. While adding inventory to the supply chain may look like a quick-fix to the challenges created by remote supply solutions, it is not. In practice, it tends to make companies less responsive to market dynamics—not more. Read this paper to find out what other options exist.
Surviving and Thriving in the Global Market
By Ann Grackin, Chainlink Research
True market leaders see change as a constant, and build a core competency in effectively responding to change into their value chain and technology enablers. This paper explores supply chain practices, making the case for a higher level approach—effective rapid response—as a key performance strategy for business, and what it takes to be a supply chain leader.-
In today's fast-moving marketplace, the customer is king. Customization, last-minute changes, aggressive pricing, and perfect order fulfillment are now critical to achieve and maintain brand loyalty. These constantly shifting consumer and business procurement demands are driving a new paradigm for supply chain and demand management—one that requires brand owners to move beyond old methods of forecasting and demand planning to solutions that support instant, accurate demand response. To succeed, companies need a combination of tools and technologies that deliver:
- Global visibility to live, actionable data from ERP, SCP, and legacy systems across internal and external supply chains
- Proactive alerting to help teams align all demand and supply considerations and respond at the moment
- Collaborative assessment of many "what-if" alternatives so participants can choose the best options
- Comprehensive scoring of potential actions against corporate goals and profit targets
Download this white paper to learn how new demand management strategies and tools can help you meet the challenges of today's demand-driven supply chain to steer business growth.
Coordinating Outsourced Manufacturing: A Win-Win Proposition for OEMs and CMs
By KinaxisManaging the demands of constant change is one of the biggest challenges facing the electronics industry today. As the relationship between brand owners and CMs evolve, the need for flexible tools and methodologies to help them effectively manage change within the supply chain becomes critical. Case Study: Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent).
Teradyne/Solectron (now Flextronics): Overcoming Challenges in OEM/CM Relationships
By KinaxisSuccess for today's manufacturers depends on the ability to respond quickly to constantly changing customer demands while keeping costs low and efficiency high. Effectively managing the "demand-driven supply chain" is highly challenging in today's increasingly outsourced and complex environment.
Rapid Response to Change Drives Breakthroughs in Manufacturing Operations Performance
By KinaxisManufacturing operations is one of the last frontiers for performance management solutions. Though enterprise-wide planning systems can improve operational efficiency, they don't address a crucial need modern manufacturers face: the ability to quickly and effectively respond to changes in supply, demand, and product. Reducing uncertainty at all stages of the manufacturing process—and making the tradeoffs necessary to resolve manufacturing operations problems across the supply chain—is key to maximizing profitability. To achieve this, companies need solutions that let them:
- Gain global visibility to live data throughout multiple disparate systems
- Give all participants a single version of the truth
- Collaboratively weigh multiple "what-if" scenarios against organizational goals
- Assess the impact of proposed actions before they're made
- Replace costly "just-in-case" strategies with a streamlined response capability
Download this white paper to see how Kinaxis™ RapidResponse delivers these capabilities to help you gain competitive advantage and improve manufacturing operations performance.
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Lean manufacturing is based on the concept that real customer demand can drive production—resulting in highly efficient, lean supply chains that deliver what customers want with much shorter lead times. To succeed at lean, a company must first adopt the philosophy, then use lean tools to apply it. Lean manufacturing tools go beyond established concepts like constraint planning and rough cut capacity planning; for instance, you can automate supply allocation to fill higher priority orders first. If you want to maximize utilization of resources and improve customer responsiveness, implementing lean practices will help you:
- Eliminate waste at every phase of production, including areas you may not have considered before
- Streamline work flow for improved efficiency and effectiveness
- Increase flexibility to handle frequent product and engineering changes—including new product introductions—while reducing work-in-progress inventory
- Access live, current data across the supply chain and beyond, eliminating information gaps that delay decision making
- Meet customer demand for higher quality products at lower cost, using less labor, less space, and less inventory
Go beyond Six Sigma quality: Lean Six Sigma is the next level to achieve optimum operations performance efficiency. Download this white paper to learn how to make your operation truly lean.
Demand Planning: How to reduce the risk and impact of inaccurate demand forecasts
By KinaxisForecasts are a key input to your demand and supply chain management. Unless you can source, make, and deliver your product in less time than your customer is willing to wait for delivery, you will need a forecast. Actually, you need two forecasts: a demand forecast to help manage your operations, and a supply forecast to tell your suppliers your requirements.
As a general rule, forecasts are always inaccurate. This white paper discusses two approaches you can use to reduce the risk and impact of inaccurate forecasts:
- Collaboration between customers and suppliers to improve the accuracy of the forecast
- Quicker response to demand changes to reduce the impact and cost of forecast error
Essential Characteristics of a Supply Chain Risk Management Strategy
By KinaxisMore and more companies now recognize the critical need for supply chain risk management. This recognition is being driven by the trend to leaner, more global supply chains. As well, unexpected events such as severe weather, terrorist attacks and financial instability have magnified the risk of supply chain disruption.
Traditional approaches to supply chain risk management focus simply on risk: identifying points in the supply chain at risk, and developing strategies to reduce that risk. After all, being prepared helps any company recover from a supply chain challenge.
But unanticipated events still occur, and risk-reduction strategies do not always work as planned. In those cases, your company must react quickly to assess the impact, determine the best response(s), and implement those responses quickly.
This white paper discusses the need for supply chain risk management (SCRM) and describes a four-phase plan to develop it in your company.
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This white paper is intended to give Supply Chain Managers the inside track on how to modernize your supply chain to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
In particular, it presents five powerful "secrets" that can help you move on from the linear tactics of the past, and take concrete steps toward a more dynamic future.
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It's hard to remember when these turbulent economic times were not with us. Many have debated the causes and cures for our difficulties, but nearly everyone agrees on one point: The economy will recover, as it always does.
Every downturn precedes an upturn. So companies that prepare now stand to win big when the upturn begins. No one comes out the other side completely the same. While some may cower for cover in the storm, the brave are hard at work establishing new ways to operate during and after the recession.
This white paper focuses on strategies to prepare for a more prosperous time ahead.
How Mid-Market Companies Can Improve Supply Chain Management
By KinaxisMid-market companies today are under pressure to contain costs, yet many need better systems, not cutbacks. How can you do both?
Given the limitations of software now being used for sales and operations planning — spreadsheets, ERP, and legacy planning — this paper looks at one way mid-market companies can roll out significantly more powerful supply chain management functions at an affordable cost by extending existing systems with specialized software delivered as a service.
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In the past 30 years, outsourcing has gone from a novelty to a generally accepted business practice for manufacturers in the Western world. While outsourcing saves money on production, results have not been stupendous. One survey of 300 enterprises revealed that on average, outsourcing saves at most 17%. And it can add costs to other functions, especially supply chain management. In the past, when most production was performed within the company, managers had good visibility into production, and short-term flexibility to deal with any supply chain challenges.
But today, outsourcing and off-shoring have increased the number of tiers in the supply chain, greatly reducing the visibility of manufacturers, and making them dependent on remote suppliers for business results.
Low-level data exchange is not enough. Key suppliers must be brought into the decision-making process, so that manufacturers can exchange early warnings with business partners, and help one another to resolve supply chain issues.
This paper discusses the value of a closer and more collaborative relationship with key suppliers and what is required to make that happen.
