Webinar

The Summary:

Keansa participated in the “Supply Chain Risk Asia” Event Hosted by Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC)

Our S&OP expert Sarbajit Sen discussed the need for “CREATING A CLEARER LENS TO YOUR SUPPLIER RISK” after the turmoil faced in recent years.

In this webinar, we reviewed some of the Supply Chain rules that we are currently using.

We examined their validity in today’s world. We also talked about

• Importance of collecting Supplier data beyond your direct supplier, deeper into your supply network
• Getting to know your supplier’s suppliers
• Importance of digitalizing your supplier master list
• Segmentation of Suppliers to identify low, medium, and high-risk suppliers based on internal and external intelligence
• Risks of sole source and single source suppliers
• Practical frameworks for evaluating, prioritizing, and managing high-risk supplies, used by global companies

Our S&OP expert Erika Barber is discussing the need for a Second Look at Supply Chain Planning Rules after the turmoil faced in recent years. In this webinar, she is reviewing some of the Supply Chain rules that we are currently using, examining their validity in today’s world, and then trying to answer some of the difficult questions faced by SC managers today:

• Should we give up on JIT supply and production?
• Can we now afford to be too lean?
• Should we consider moving to Sovereign Supply Chains, where all labour input for a good comes from our local country?
• Why is my line shut down due to inventory shortages for a product supplied by a vendor who I have rated as an “A”?
• How do we achieve more flexibility in our supply chain?

The Summary:

As we Know Supply Chains are showing extreme volatility and stress during the current times. The leaders are questioning the usefulness of traditional methods of planning and execution and are looking for better processes and tools to stay in control. A careful investigation of their situation reveals the following needs:

1. Visibility of up-to-date and connected supply chain information
2. Understanding the impact of change on business performance objectives
3. Decision support on how to respond to emerging situations

Supply Chain organizations must connect and align their business processes and information systems. Implementing an EPM-powered Sales and Operations Planning process can give them a big advantage.

As part of this live webinar, we will address common questions raised in an S&OP meeting:

• What is causing my large inventory fluctuations?
• My backlog is continuously growing. What is the root cause?
• If I see large changes in plans from month to month. Should I be concerned…? & More

Forecasting is a technique of predicting the future based on historical data results. It involves a thorough analysis of past data to predict future outcomes. Forecasting uses Statistical methods, Machine Learning models, and human decision methods and is an ever-relevant and dynamic field of knowledge.

In the supply chain context, especially for Demand Planning, an accurate and reliable forecast is very important, because it helps organizations align resources more effectively to fulfill customer and internal KPIs. However, from our experience, we have seen companies struggling to generate meaningful and usable forecasts despite their investments in enabling the process using a plethora of systems and tools.

The Summary:

Being all things to all people isn’t always the best business strategy. Sometimes, channelling slight variations of different products and services to different groups of your customer base helps to increase market share, improve revenues, and reduce costs. This differentiation process is called “Segmentation,” and when applied to products it is known as ‘Product Segmentation’. In the context to supply chain planning, an increasing challenge is to manage many items with unreliable demand forecasts. While improving demand forecast accuracy in general leads to a more efficient supply response, the business value of accurate forecasting is not uniform for all items that a company carries. Therefore, an obsessive focus on forecast accuracy alone sometimes leads to diminishing returns. The product segmentation principle leads us to NOT treat all products as equally important and apply different operational strategies for a different group of products. In this brief video, Sarbajit discusses practical pitfalls, methods, and results of applying product segmentation that we have seen from past experiences. Tune into this short session for more.

The Summary:

Despite all attempts to protect Supply Plans from nervous shocks, priority changes from Sales. In an increasingly unpredictable supply chain, change of priorities because of “urgent customer demands” is a reality that S&OP needs to address. Often when such urgent changes in priorities are discussed in an S&OP meeting, convenience wins over rationale. Worse, these conversations are repeated cycle after cycle sapping out useful energy. Frequent conversations do not necessarily imply better decisions. From our experience, what helps organizations greatly, are scenario-based decision tools, that help compose alternative supply plans based on changing priorities. Using scenario planning, supply planners can inform Sales about the options available to them. With visual tools clearly comparing plans on service levels and resource utilization metrics, a win-win response can emerge.

The Summary:

Dynamic slotting helps planners to maintain profitability by limiting of the set of time slots offered to individual customers. Customer choice means that tailoring offers to customers to entice them to select less popular time slots can create a more even distribution of deliveries. Dynamic slotting decisions depend on the current request, the already accepted orders, and orders still expected to arrive in the remainder of the order horizon. They entail solving three connected subproblems: Determining the feasibility of delivering the current requested order per time slot, determining the opportunity cost of promising the delivery and thereby potentially limiting the resources for accepting future expected orders, and determining the optimal assortment of offered time slots to maximize revenue given stochastic customer choice.

Business disruptions have always been a component of our industrial world. However, this year has presented yet another disruption — on a much larger scale. The impact to organizations’ Supply Chains from the supply of our raw materials, shortfalls in production levels, manpower shortages and radical changes in demand for products and services was evident in multiple industries. What have we learned in the past year and how can we better prepare for the future?

Learn more on –

• Why traditional Sales and Operations Planning tools need to be used differently to minimize the impact of disruptions?
• Why the focus needs to change from forecast accuracy to agile business processes?
• Why it is critical to have a centralized data base for Data Analytics coupled with a digital Supply Chain platform to help minimize disruption impact?

We have been hearing of various companies surviving the pandemic by pivoting their processes and/or their products to a new direction. To do that, they had to capitalize on the relationships with their vendors. These relationships require more than “purchasing”, which is a reactive process. It is developed through “procurement” – a proactive process. We will discuss the difference between the two, and how focusing on the latter will better prepare you for future disruptions.

Covid-19 threw the demand and supply balance into disarray for many companies. Many of those who had a formal S&OP process were able to leverage its benefits, allowing them to pivot quickly. The pandemic may have stalled your progress to develop your own S&OP process, but are there really other factors at play? In this presentation, we will discuss various pitfalls of getting S&OP off the ground. We will discuss the strengths of developing a formal process using a connected planning platform and the urgency of getting this in place before you get hit with the next major disruption.