Solutions/Advanced Analytics/Sales & Operations Planning

Sales & Operations Planning

Our integrated custom S&OP solutions built from first principles enable clients to control and customize their planning processes. Our models help streamline demand planning, that results in accurate material planning and optimal inventory, which further results in higher service levels and lower working capital.

.

Demand Planning

We develop customized tools for forecasting demand using various approaches based on the client’s business operations. We employ a full range of custom-modeling options and detailed visualization tools to cater to various business needs.

Key features of our solutions

Context based selection of algorithms: Our tools select the most suitable forecasting technique, depending on the business context and data patterns, from a host of statistical techniques such as ARIMA, Holt-Winters exponential smoothening, generalized Cochrane-Orcutt models, Box-Jenkins models, Dynamic regression etc.
Consensus forecasting: Balancing the statistical rigor with business judgment is essential to generate the final demand plan, therefore, we build-in override features on the tools that provide the flexibility to adjust/overlay statistical forecasts, allow for extrapolation of product category aggregates to SKU level data, use discrete data models for low volume data, new SKUs, new channels etc.
Reporting and tracking variance: Our solutions enable clients to automatically generate out-of-sample MAPE, MAD and GMRAE statistics to measure forecast performance. It displays a comprehensive set of metrics such as error auto correlation function, correlation matrix etc. These metrics help to quickly evaluate the robustness of the forecast models.
Seamless integration with existing data: Our tools can import data in a variety of flexible, easy-to-create formats including Excel, text files and ODBC. We provide the ability to plug in and cleanse data generated from various ERP systems.

Supply Planning (Material Requirement Planning)

We develop robust applications that work in sync with the client’s ERP systems to develop supply plans for placing orders from suppliers’ manufacturing units or from external vendors for both raw materials and finished goods. Our solutions incorporate supplier lead times, component availability, demand schedule, inventory positions, MOQs, optimal order quantity, and other client-specific constraints to generate accurate order planning schedules that suit the needs of the business.

Inventory Optimization

Managing optimal inventory levels is a common problem area for businesses. The risk of stock-outs has to be balanced with the working capital requirements and holding costs of excess inventory.

To address this problem, we use analytical techniques to accurately estimate safety stock levels and optimum inventory requirements at SKU, product group, customer and location level based on demand forecast, demand volatility, lead times, lead time variability, target service levels etc. We provide clients with a user-friendly way to estimate the safety stock, optimal inventory and track the variations in inventory levels and predict stock-outs on a daily or weekly basis.

Logistics and distribution

Businesses are always trying to optimize their network footprint and flow of goods and services, to reduce logistics and distribution costs. We leverage historical and forecasted flow of goods to design the optimal location network and channel for lower distribution costs. We also tap directly into the third-party APIs of the logistics providers to model the real-time costs and provide dynamic logistical solutions.

We also analyze FedEx, UPS or local courier shipments data (through EDI or APIs) to accurately identify contract compliance and summary of invoicing broken out into various components, that allows for robust analyses for cost reduction opportunities.

Manufacturing Operations

We develop analytical solutions to optimize Manufacturing Operations. We partner with clients to generate capacity planning models based on demand forecast and inventory benchmark, identify capacity bottlenecks through OEE modeling and plan production schedules. This results in higher capacity utilization and better planning of capital expenditure.