Is Your Planning and Production Aligned?

Customer demand in today’s consumer-driven, multi-channel marketplace is more volatile than ever. Yet the majority of manufacturers are still using outdated production planning methods, such as spreadsheets and plant by plant scheduling, to make critical planning decisions.

The JDA Vision 2015 Supply Chain Market Study is based on a global executive survey, with responses coming from 17 countries across many industries. An important take-away from the production planning and scheduling section of this report is that these methods are not well aligned with executives’ stated strategies.

To deal with these complexities and better respond to demand volatility while balancing customer services levels and supply chain costs, more than 8 in 10 responding companies, and all respondents over $5 billion in revenue, are turning to segmentation strategies. By segmenting their customer base and products, they can align them with the production planning strategy that best fits each segment’s volume and service needs, such as make to order vs. make to stock. By aligning the segments to the best production planning and supply chain strategies, companies can reduce cycle times, lower inventory levels, improve margins and provide differentiated levels of service.

Even if your company is nowhere near the 5 billion mark you make want to consider tailoring products and services to your local consumers. 

We all know the old saying, ”Happy Wife = Happy Life.” Well a successful business must have “Happy Customers.” 

If your business has at least a one year history you can generate for the next twelve months based on historical sales data, the consensus forecast generated during the demand review and with inputs from sales and marketing teams and the demand planner. But, only if your business the necessary data with which to pull the facts need to make your forecasts. What software or data collection does your business have in place to track all the aspects need to do future sales, production and planning forecasting?

Do you have a way to focus on more information, less data? This can be another key to successful sales and operations planning using clean, current, and accurate data. Plans are often slowed down by the effort of gathering data that has minimal importance to the overall project. It is important to ensure that you know exactly what business problem you are trying to resolve and understand the minimum data necessary for the project.

SMART Service Desk IT Service Management Software is a great start to creating your very own customer service legends. We know that your satisfied customers will return again and again. Let us help you increase productivity, reduce operations cost and improve customer experience with our ITIL compliant solutions. No matter the size of your business we have your customer retention solutions.

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