Supply Chain Planning Services - Overview

Our Supply Chain planning services provide your business with the insights and thought leadership you need when navigating sales and operations planning, integrated business planning, demand driven decision-making, demand management, supply planning, inventory optimisation and managed services.

Sales and Operations Planning and Integrated Business Planning

The rapid increase in technological advancements brings an ocean of new information. Managers are less concerned about the volume of information compared with translating it to value-add insights, which drive business decisions and strategy.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP) are key process enablers that deliver business-critical information to the management team across various business functions. Our team have the skills, tools, and frameworks to deliver a transformational program for businesses: 

  • Scenario modelling, financial impact assessment, customer service, and cost translation.
  • Gap analysis and scenario modelling across high-risk issues.
  • Operating model review.
  • Reporting and C-suite dashboarding.

We facilitate conversation around facts and insights that allow management teams to control, empower, and implement significant business decisions. Our approach caters to key C-suite stakeholders such as:

  • CEOs: To deliver a quantum leap in the company results and greater value to stakeholders.
  • CFOs: To improve month-end results as well as achieve a complete reconciliation between the real financial actuals and the promises made via business planning and performance management process.
  • COOs: To focus company resources to maximise key value drivers by adjusting company plans to constant feedback and response capabilities.

Demand-Driven Decision Making

Demand-driven decision making is a new and trending multi-echelon supply chain planning and execution methodology. As Australia’s leading demand-driven practitioners, we offer practical solutions to businesses experiencing supply chain and commercial conflict across their functions. We regularly track a business’ inventory fluctuating between out of stock and excess stock, which leads to strained customer service performance.

We address environments exposed to demand and supply volatility and no longer rely on the need for high levels of forecast accuracy . This enables businesses to shift their supply chain model from the traditional approach of push-based replenishment to a pull-based sales order–driven model.

This change is necessitated because of the high degree of customer, market, environment, and intercompany volatility and variability that we experience in today’s supply chains — truly a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world.

The secret to success of demand-driven supply chains reside in an enterprise-wide transformation project, such as:

  • Adopting a new demand-driven operating model.
  • Implementing a demand-driven software system (DDMRP ).
  • Redesigning planning processes, roles, and responsibilities to a new way of working.
  • Realigning flow-based demand-driven metrics.
  • Facilitating certified training from Demand Driven Institute™ (DDI), the leading think tank and governing body.
  • Reconfiguring businesses; strategic planning to align with the latest Adaptive S&OP approach.

Demand Management

Without a strong understanding of what a business should be selling and a clear picture of what they think they will sell, we rapidly see businesses wasting resources and underwhelming customers with their service performance.

We bring years of experience to help businesses understand their demand picture and rapidly mature their demand management processes, systems, and governance. Our approach is tailored for businesses to achieve breakthrough results across multiple demand management areas such as:

  • Product and portfolio management: To drive a robust segmentation and classification schema.
  • Product lifecycle management:  
    • New product introduction: From development and supply chain readiness to market launch.
    • End-of-life management: To constructively and profitably transition or end product offerings. 
  • Assessment and benchmarking: To deliver clear industry insights via assessment and benchmarking.
  • Demand planning basis management: To develop a strong data foundation, which ensures both internal and external factors are correlated.
  • Cross-functional engagement, forecast consensus management, strong accountability and clear measurement.

Supply Planning

With increased demand from customers and shrinking tolerance times, businesses need teams to remain agile and responsive. This can be particularly daunting when costs and capacity pressure from within businesses are taken into consideration. Our team has solved this dilemma on numerous occasions by:
  • Developing strategies to reduce the bullwhip effect.
  • Generating clear cost and service indicators.
  • Integrating with core service schedules.
  • Establishing robust and integrated collaboration across supply functions.
  • Driving metric alignment with balanced scorecards.
  • Performing policy reviews, optimisation and end-to-end establishment.
  • Focusing on supplier integration and supply management through technology, process, and change management.

Inventory Optimisation

Is inventory as an asset or a liability? Far too many functions within a business cannot answer “asset” to this question. This position is supported by a quick review of the financials, which often reveals inventory as the primary working capital choke point.

We return businesses’ inventory to its position as an asset by meeting customer service expectations and providing a strong base for market expansion, utilising a number or tools and techniques:

  • Rapid inventory health checks and identifying quick wins and medium-term strategies.
  • Performing a full end-to-end diagnostic to ensure the right-sizing of inventory across all echelons
  • Developing and aligning inventory policies and level setting to best support the business and supply chain strategy.
  • Modelling alternative scenarios against service expectations and cost and finding the ideal level for growth.
  • Performing root-cause analysis to identify key reasons for driving up stock levels and draft key action plans to address root causes of SLOB inventory.
  • Realigning performance metrics to ensure early warning signs and clear barometers are in place to avoid performance regression.

Managed Services

With a strong technology base and globally integrated system, we support businesses in finding sustainable and cost-effective managed service models. Between embedding full-time resources into the planning functions or completely offshoring specific functions to subject matter experts, we are highly skilled in:

  • Running demand and supply planning functions through resource augmentation roles.
  • Leading S&OP executive meetings.
  • Assisting clients’ entire offshore planning functions to highly skilled delivery centres abroad.
  • Managing inventory remotely as a service.
  • Providing deep analytics and reporting platforms and insights.
  • Transforming master and planning data management through various in house developed bots, AI, and ML algorithms.

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