To wrap up this series, I’d like to now briefly comment on the importance of an integrated user experience for supply chain planners.

All About the Interface

When it comes to supply chain planning in general and synchronized planning in particular, user roles are converging. Now, almost all roles have access to planning and execution data and visibility across the entire design-to-operate lifecycle.

With technology and integrated environments that put information at our fingertips, it may no longer be required for organizations to maintain so many different roles for managing the minutiae of supply chain planning and execution. Today, you can bring all relevant information together in one unified user experience.

Think of it as the planner’s workspace – a unified access point to all data and analytics required to make decisions confidently and execute the decision from the same place. The data may span multiple time horizons, organizations, and vertical dimensions such as production, scheduling, procurement or transportation. This enables the convergence of traditional supply chain planner roles and emergence of a planner that handles an entire value stream.

Greater Responsiveness and Agility

Let’s say a company has an emergency customer order. This is an important customer, a lot of revenue is at stake, and you want to fill the order but not upset any current commitments to other customers. The challenge, quite frankly, is nothing new for you. You know that you need to scramble.

What exactly does the customer require – and in what quantity? What are the service levels expected? Do you have the materials in inventory? Maybe you do – but maybe it’s dedicated to other jobs. In such a case, you may consider rebalancing your inventory – taking materials slated for one job and reassigning it to this new job. But then how do you keep your other customers happy and deliver as promised? And what about the logistics? Do you have the freight carriers in place to move materials as needed and get the product out the door? What if additional change over is required on the production scheduling side?

In supply chain parlance, this is the definition of scrambling. But your customer with the emergency order needs an answer quickly. How can you get back with an answer within minutes rather than hours or days?

For such scenarios, the old methods of traversing systems, pulling data into spreadsheets, and sharing it all with colleagues via email doesn’t work. A planner’s workspace enables you to move faster. This is a game changer.

With a centralized view into all of your plans – long-term strategic plans, mid-term tactical plans, and short-term operational plans – you can make decisions in minutes because you can understand where you stand immediately. Hunting for data is dramatically reduced. And with collaboration tools built in, you can work with colleagues in real time based on an agreed version of the truth.

This, in the end, helps you follow through on the imperatives of synchronized planning. You can keep strategic goals in view even while finalizing operational details down to the shop floor. The interface matters tremendously. Without something like a planner’s workspace, you’re already putting yourself behind the eight ball in terms of agility and responsiveness to change.

In an age of disruption – whether it’s Covid or something else (and something else will always come up) – you need integration and visibility. You need the ability to access planning tools, see inventory levels, adjust schedules, move materials, nail down the logistics, run simulations, and evaluate the ramifications of your decisions. Bringing all such functions and capabilities together in a unified workspace for planning excellence is a key component for realizing success.

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Contract manufacturing is different

One relevant question is: What about contract manufacturing? How does synchronized planning apply to companies that outsource their manufacturing?

Take for instance, the high-tech industry. Most companies that make computers and other high-tech devices are essentially design and brand owners who work with oversees partners to build the products they sell. For these companies, their relationship to execution is different. They don’t necessarily require the linkages that connect the boardroom to the shop floor within their own enterprise.

Nevertheless, they cannot afford to abandon oversight with their trading partners. If they want their brand to thrive, they need ways to monitor manufacturing progress, ensure quality, and coordinate activities around logistics.

Collaborating with your business network

This is where the importance of business networks comes into play. Today’s globally dispersed supply chains require digital, standardized ways for connecting to and working with partners all over the world.

Business networks that connect trading partners in a many-to-many way offer this at much higher scalability and efficiency. And because the global economy is increasingly subject to shocks such as COVID, Brexit, or natural disasters, these business networks need to be flexible enough to support new plans as they’re modified, onboard new trading partners quickly, and unlock additional content to collaborate on.

Speed and efficiency are of the essence. Think of business networks like the “content aware” internet of business relationships. Organizations want to connect once and then share business data in real time with any trading partner they are dealing with, potentially over multiple tiers. For a brand owner connecting with a contract manufacturer and their suppliers, this means dozens of data objects that need to be exposed and shared.

In this context, outdated peer-to-peer data connections like electronic data interchange (EDI), flat files, e-mails, and dedicated portals require too much effort to build and maintain. They’re brittle when it comes to changing business dynamics. For suppliers, such approaches meant that you need to adapt to different brand owners’ proprietary way of connecting. Business networks take that work away. You connect once and are ready to do business with anyone else on the network adopting a common data model (canonical).

Based in the cloud, business networks provide a standardized way to share data and collaborate. Finding and onboarding new suppliers and partners is accelerated. Business networks can also support complex, multi-tier supply chain relationships that may include third party logistics providers and distribution partners.

Take for instance the making of a strategic subcomponent – like a high-end camera in a laptop computer. The brand owner in this case might want to work with a specialized vendor to manufacture the camera to detailed specifications and then dropship it to the primary contract manufacturer, who then adds it to the laptop. Business networks can support such arrangements with visibility for all parties involved.

Orchestration in real-time

We can also think of business networks as real-time orchestration platforms that enable integrated business planning across globally dispersed supply chain partners. Integrated business planning brings together all the functions in the design-to-operate lifecycle. Phases of this lifecycle include design, manufacturing, logistics and operations – with the planning function interfused throughout.

Organizations can use business networks to incorporate demand signals into the plan, make design changes that reflect what customers want, manage the handoff to manufacturing, run the associated logistics, and even track the product during the operations phase – from delivery to the customer to the support and warranty phase. With data sharing, real-time visibility, collaboration tools, and communications, a business network should enable an organization to orchestrate all the activities from design to operate to deliver better experiences to customers.

Synchronization made possible

With improved abilities to orchestrate planning and execution activities throughout the supply chain, organizations can also use business networks to support synchronized planning across enterprise boundaries. Collaboration with partners and access to data and insight makes for better long-term strategic planning and represents a win-win situation between trading partners. Easy onboarding and flexible ways to connect with new partners helps with mid- and long-term plan corrections. And when it comes to execution, real-time visibility and tracking can help ensure that plans go off without a hitch. The result is better agility for responding to change.

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For supply chain planners, this situation puts a premium on agility. Not that long-term planning is a thing of the past. It remains foundational – but in addition to it, organizations need more flexible planning processes to anticipate and react faster as circumstances change.

Supply chain planning is the practice of sensing demand in the market from short to long term and connecting it to the resources required to service that demand profitably.

Organizations need the ability to plan across long-term, mid-term, and short-term time horizons – all of which form a connected continuum that synchronizes vertically through the supply chain, down to the machine, truck, or individual labor resource.

Over time, the systems that support supply chain planning have become more powerful and integrated – which has helped broaden the planning scope. Now, for example, you can bring in the finance perspective using massive volumes of data to make better growth and investment decisions within seconds.

Organizations also benefit from advanced analytics. With machine learning, heuristics, and optimization techniques based on statistical methods, you can remove human bias from planning calculations and chart the way forward with a much higher degree of precision and confidence. The upshot is that companies have the tools, systems, and processes in place to keep inventory levels low and optimize costs while delivering a better service experience to their customers.

This, in a nutshell, is the idea behind synchronized planning – and today’s technology has the ability to support what, in the past, could only be accomplished across many different, potentially disconnected systems and processes.

Strategic planning for the long term

Strategic planning attempts to see as far into the future as possible. The lens looks out two or three years or even longer, and teams build plans that serve as a starting point for driving the business.

What are your expectations? How much do you want to sell? What new products do you want to bring to market? What resources do you need to follow through? These are the kinds of questions asked during the strategic planning phase.

Based on the answers to these questions, you can start to take action. Maybe you need some investments to realize your objectives – new plants or new machines. Perhaps you’re planning to introduce new products – which means that design teams need to come together and collaborate with marketing, manufacturing, and critical suppliers. And to make sure that you don’t cannibalize your other offerings, you also want to analyze your decisions at the portfolio level.

Tactical planning for the mid-term

When you’re looking approximately 3-6 months out, that’s when you move into tactical or mid-term planning where you can still balance out demand and supply on a bigger scale. How are your strategic goals and assumptions tracking? Do you need to make changes relative to volumes and timing on an aggregate level or maybe adjust your portfolio? Has the demand picture evolved? Are the distribution channels and manufacturing capacity in place to execute?

Operational planning for the short-term

Operational planning is most closely associated with execution. Have you ordered the materials needed for production? Are they expected arrive at the right time in the right quantity? Do you have enough inventory to buffer for uncertainties? Do you have the needed capacity to execute? What’s your labor picture look like? Can you fill all shifts, or do you need to balance your labor?

Addressing these issues requires on-the-ground production planning and detailed scheduling capabilities that connect to the shop floor and keep production lines humming – all while reducing overhead in change-over and improving utilization. It requires warehouse visibility to pick the right materials and make sure they’re on the line at the right time.

It also requires powerful logistics to ensure transportation resources are available and scheduled to meet the plan. Many organizations, of course, operate on a global scale – with hundreds of production facilities around the globe. This only adds to the complexity and raises the stakes.

The synchronized part

Synchronized planning says that all planning activities need to be connected digitally to support a sense of continuum across each time horizon – long, mid, and short. The strategy formalized in your long-term plan provides the guard rails. Any decisions made in the mid or short term need to be evaluated in terms of how they impact strategic goals.

At the same time, all plans need to connect to execution on individual manufacturing lines. Helpful in this regard are simulation capabilities for evaluating different scenarios and implementing the best decisions. This way, you can plan ahead for changes, making disruptions less of a problem.

Ultimately, as our recent experience with COVID-19 underscores, the goal is resilience. Companies with the systems and technology in place to quickly implement supply chain changes as realities change on the ground – these are the companies that thrive even in the face of disruption.

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