Our Solutions:

Demand planning is a more scientific version of sales forecasting, using statistical extrapolation of past sales to predict future sales.

This ‘stat forecast’ is the baseline demand plan, which is then adjusted by the sales team, marketing team, and sometimes the customers themselves, to give a consensus ‘unconstrained’ demand plan.

The unconstrained plan is passed to Supply Planning, and a ‘constrained’ plan is returned, showing what can be produced. There are three steps in the supply planning process:

• Inventory Planning
• Material Requirements Planning (MRP) including third party manufacture (3PM), and
• Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP)

This constrained plan is then passed to Distribution Planning to finalise customer allocations, and to Production Scheduling to plan production shifts.

Distribution Planning is the process of allocating finished good inventory to likely customer orders, and then getting it to the closest distribution centre to enable a quick shipment to a customer. Optimisation of space, both in warehouses and on trucks, is an important consideration.

Production Scheduling is the process of allocating production from Supply Planning to actual work centres (e.g. machines or production lines). Each work centre has different parameters – throughput, staffing, shift hours, maintenance requirements etc. and, as with distribution planning, the planning process benefits from the use of optimisation algorithms to achieve the most efficient outcome.

Traditionally, supplier collaboration has involved the exchange and confirmation of purchase orders, promotional plans and other changes in trading terms. In a Sustainably Planned Business, supplier portals are expanded to help gather carbon, water and energy footprints from the upstream supply chain, as well as modern slavery and other social sustainability data.

NPD planning has two parts:

• Development programme management, assessing the viability of a new product projects through various stage gates to commercialisation
• The incorporation of successful new products into demand and supply plans

The Sustainably Planned Business will also include environmental and social sustainability criteria in the NPD assessment process and ensure that these become part of an extended Bill of Materials (BOM), providing a more holistic view of product impact.