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Advanced Planning and Scheduling Solutions Shake Up Supply Chain Management

Next-gen advanced manufacturing changes business

​New supply chain planning solutions are providing data insights that accelerate decision making to near real time and raise supply chain agility to a new level. Find out how early adopters of advanced planning and scheduling (APS) solutions are entering new customer segments, improving margins and service, and simultaneously reducing costs.

APS solutions: Better business processes, smart technology

Volatile economics have elevated the strategic position of supply chains, forcing an evolution to more dynamic, flexible advanced manufacturing models. Commodity price swings, on-shoring, shifting consumer preferences, and fast-moving competitors have required new thinking—from planning to execution—and finding innovative ways to make global supply chains more integrated and agile. APS solutions are helping businesses make this shift.

Delivering capabilities to maneuver and win in the marketplace demands an updated approach to planning that is rooted in deeper market insights, pulls together a wider range of stakeholders, and can improve speed, flexibility, and responsiveness throughout the supply chain network. While business processes are key to sustaining capabilities, technology is a critical building block of a comprehensive solution. Great things can happen when these two strands meet in an organization ready for a change.

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Bottom-line benefits

Technology advancements are helping companies improve both internal and external supply chain management through better connectivity, visibility, and collaboration. Holistic strategies that leverage the latest APS solutions can transform supply chain and manufacturing resource planning in these powerful ways:

  • Enable global strategy & operations to quickly capture local and global market updates and share updated plans broadly across the organization.
  • Shape demand by integrating sales, marketing, and procurement with supply planning to continuously manage profits and track performance against plan.
  • Perform end-to-end planning by integrating demand, inventory, and supply chain planning across the global network to rapidly assess the impact of business decisions and evaluate what-if scenarios.
  • Sense, analyze, and respond quickly and effectively to changes in the business environment, localized events, and competitor tactics, and perform root cause analysis to identify improvement opportunities.

Start the journey

As you evaluate your options for APS solutions, there are some key considerations:

  • Plan as an integrated set of capabilities, have an end-to-end planning vision for processes, and integrate with supporting applications. This is important for creating a transformation roadmap and making better decisions in the short-term.
  • Create business requirements that cover the ability to provide a broad solution such as integration of finance, balancing demand and supply, and a deep solution such as inventory optimization targets, statistical forecast, and supply constraint modeling.
  • Plan for the potential impact of transformation on the entire organization due to stakeholders involved in the planning processes. Organization and change management should be key parts of the program.