Planning the Supply Chain in Real-Time With Anaplan
In today’s constantly flexing world, the ability to create an accurate and agile Supply Chain plan has never been more essential to an organization’s success. Finance and marketing are two areas that are typically used in silos, which require unprecedented insight. The complexity of supply chains has increased and a growing number of factors influence important decisions. Consequently, systems need to consider data from several sources to inform their plans and optimize their decisions. It’s worth exploring the Anaplan supply chain if your organization wants to focus on model-based decision support.
What is Anaplan?
The Anaplan software is a cloud-native and predictive modeling-focused product. According to Gartner, Anaplan is well suited for supporting planning across all aspects of planning, particularly in its ability to configure and model optimal responses to changing signals. Supply Planning, Demand Planning, Sales Planning, and Operations Planning are included in Anaplan. Anaplan for supply chain integrates with various ERP and CRM systems and planning applications using pre-built connectors and APIs.
Benefits and usability
Taking advantage of Anaplan’s ability to overcome barriers that exist with traditional, siloed planning tools is one of its hallmarks. The honeycomb design of Anaplan explains how different groups interact visually. Companies can increase forecast accuracy and reduce bias using Anaplan’s Demand Planning software by taking into account internal and external factors as well as statistical forecast modeling. In addition to providing real-time data, Anaplan incorporates forecasting scenario planning for maximum accuracy across the entire supply chain and provides end-to-end visibility into the market. In addition, Anaplan offers reports, dashboards, and customizable alerts so you can optimize performance and keep track of KPIs. As a Sales & Operations Planning tool, Anaplan has a unique niche due to its origins in financial planning and sales forecasting. In S&OP, businesses can pull signals from multiple business units to make the most informed decisions. Anaplan’s recent acquisition of Mintigo has strengthened its AI/Machine Learning expertise, further strengthening its ability to provide accurate models that automatically respond to new variables.
What if scenarios, use cases, and optimization
An Anaplan strength is optimizing logistics functions for your business. With the Anaplan Optimizer engine, models for Inventory Optimization and Supply Network Optimization can be created using what-if scenarios based on variables such as lead times, changes in demand, and supply reliability.
Anaplan has been used to build a more responsive budget in less time than previously required, in addition to Supply Chain optimization. Using Anaplan, others have been able to maximize staffing efficiency in their warehouses, decreasing overtime costs. Additionally, Anaplan has been used to create a thorough financial analysis to aid in vendor negotiations. It allows for a transparent view into real-time models that is suitable for use in virtually any scenario requiring sales planning, capacity planning, or any other function.
Supply chain management involves what aspect?
Managing global inventories
By implementing Anaplan, inventories can be reduced by 20–30%, while customer service levels could be increased. Having real-time visibility into your anticipated inventory level and your investment potential allows you to adjust inventory targets, based on customer service.
Collaborating with suppliers
Anaplan lets you develop supply plans, share them, and collaborate on them. From a single source, data can be viewed in real-time, allowing your team to analyze the current situation, conduct “What if” scenarios, and set forward-looking goals.
Planning master production
Oftentimes, companies are only concerned with production cost or investment cost, not all other costs, such as transportation, inventory, or tax. Anaplan enables you to identify tradeoffs among cost elements using a dashboard that integrates all planning views tightly.
Plans for inventory
• Improve customer service by coordinating service times on multi-level bills of materials (BOMs) and distribution routes.
• Plan safety stock in accordance with deviations in demand variability
• Optimize service levels in response to fluctuating demand by following goal-based optimization
• Inventory turns can be improved if inventory risk is pooled upstream and downstream
• New products will be more quickly available to customers when using time-varying targets
Production planning
• Provide timely and accurate production plans that are updated according to changes in supply and delivery networks as needed
• Meeting customer needs and reducing costs by planning capacity and production according to constraints
• Leverage automation and custom business rules to optimize supply chain constraints
• Comparing alternatives to production plans via graphical displays
What is the importance of supply chain management?
No matter how positive or negative, the supply chain’s performance resonates throughout the corporation. It is crucial to understand that a customer’s experience is divided into two main categories: customer satisfaction and ROI.
A well-connected and well-communicated supply chain is the foundation of trustworthy return processes. Customer satisfaction or even exceeding expectations is the result of an efficient supply chain. Generally, the whole business benefits from higher-order rates, positive customer perceptions, and reduced costs of service.
How can increasing performance = increasing efficiency = increasing pressure?
Higher performance is dependent upon a more efficient supply chain that moves goods and services to market.
The increased supply chain efficiency that results in an increase in volume or quality results in increased pressure on team members and their capabilities.
If your business is in good health, then you will have good cash management and revenue conversion. Business performance can be evaluated using metrics like working capital turnover or cash conversion rate. When it comes to flattening the cost curve, two factors are required: decision-speed and quality improvements (process and data), and a tool that scales with its value to the organization.
Conclusion
An Anaplan implementation can help your organization create real-time models that support decision making, but it’s not a panacea — Anaplan still needs to be integrated into a holistic strategy to include business strategy, priorities, growth plans, and existing technology, data quality, and organizational readiness. We at Polestar Solution can explain how to create a comprehensive supply chain strategy, or help you select a toolset that meets your current supply chain needs via a systematic, comprehensive approach.
