Pathways to Evolve
No matter where you are on the supply chain planning maturity curve now, it's time to make your move toward a high-performance supply chain.
The Ultimate Guide for Your Supply Chain Journey
Our Pathways to Evolve helps you determine what you need to succeed in your unique supply chain planning initiative by charting the path and pace that best aligns to you. Starting wherever you are in your digital transformation today, our Atlas Planning Platform helps you replace rigid systems and processes with agile and flexible new capabilities. Atlas stays with you for the whole journey, evolving and accelerating you toward your vision of supply chain planning excellence.
A supply chain transformation journey can seem daunting, but it shouldn’t be. To help simplify the process, we’ve distilled the areas of supply chain planning – S&OP, Demand, Inventory, Supply, Deliver – and created individual guides to help you chart your course forward. Together, they are the catalyst for a comprehensive transformation.
In each area we outline common challenges, how each impacts your organization and the steps you can take to mature your processes. This journey follows the Start, Evolve, Accelerate formula – growing with you as you grow your supply chain planning competence.
Table of Contents:
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Demand Planning |
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S&OP |
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Inventory |
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Supply |
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Deliver |
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Pick the Right Partner |
Demand Planning
Volatile markets, complex demand signals, shorter product life cycles, and geopolitical and economic uncertainty impact your planning at every step, from raw materials to finished goods. Your company's ability to sense, analyze, and shape demand must move beyond foundational tools such as spreadsheets and homegrown software used by siloed functional teams.
S&OP
Today’s fast-changing market dynamics have put serious strain on traditional Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)/IBP processes. In times of disruption, supply chain leaders must embrace an approach that involves more alignment, collaboration, and advanced planning capabilities to create a mature S&OP process that drives decision making. To achieve a solid S&OP plan, organizations must run scenarios and make trade-offs, cooperate across functions, and continuously orchestrate concurrent business activities to enable quick adjustments and effectively respond to unexpected disruptions.
Inventory
Raw materials, work in process, and finished and semi-finished goods represent a powerful lever to drive revenue and profitability. Inventory management often focuses on finding a better way to sense and respond to demand while ignoring other constraints of the supply network design. This can result in hedging with safety stock to buffer against variability, which traps working capital and increases warehousing costs.
Supply
Companies must gain better control and efficiency over supply planning to effectively address challenges and disruption. This requires adopting effective strategies and techniques to increase visibility and simulate various supply capacity, production planning, and scheduling strategies. Advanced capabilities in supply planning solutions allow managers to reap the benefits of advanced scenario planning, cross-functional collaboration and greater levels of granularity for improved decision-making and long-term success.
Deliver
The ability to deliver lies at the heart of your competitive edge. A smart supply chain can only be successful when its products are fulfilled, moved, and delivered as promised. Supply chain managers must link planning to execution. The challenge is integrating delivery realities such as resource scheduling and warehouse and labor constraints into often siloed functions, such as production and transportation.
An advanced supply chain planning platform plays a crucial role in the broad ecosystem of a company's technologies and partners. Supply chain planning is all about balancing supply and demand while aligning financial, strategic, and supply chain goals.
A successful supply chain digital transformation depends on finding the right partner. Knowing what questions to ask and what signs to watch for in selecting a supply chain planning platform to power your transformation journey is essential.
Our eBook 5 Key Questions to Set Your Supply Chain Planning on the Right Path offers valuable insights. For instance, what does a true, symbiotic partnership look like? How can you avoid getting bogged down in "implementation hell." We've also published a handy infographic on the five questions. Finally, read our blog posts on building a bright future with a supply chain planning partner and making the most of peer software reviews.