| Warehouse replenishment optimisation. Effective and efficient warehouse management is a key component of today’s supply chain:The key to success is making use of:- Sophisticated forecasting,
- Real-time information visibility,
- SKU by SKU optimisation,
- Automatic stock adjustment for seasonal variation,
- Balance between customer forecast and historical data,
- Full integration with your ERP, e-mail and web-based systems,
- A full range of “what if?” analyses as well as operational tools.
| |  |
Solution details
Integration and reporting benefits: The operational system runs on your servers and takes data direct from your existing ERP or WMS system, on a daily or real-time basis, and produces the following reports: - Replenishment needs,
- Expedite list,
- Over-stock and Under-stock analysis,
- Customer and Supplier service levels,
- Customer forecast accuracy.
All of these reports can be directed back to your systems (for fully automated replenishment), e-mailed, served to the web, or archived. In addition you also have access to a complete analysis tool running online or offline on your own PCs.
Replenishment analysis, simulation and optimisation capabilities:
Inventory Optimiser as a powerful decision support tool allows more detailed analysis, graphing, reporting export to Excel, etc. This can be done for each warehouse, customer or at the level of a single SKU.
The tool client can be used to override target stock levels (and see the impacts of those changes), to change replenishment policies, and adjust the relative importance of customer forecasts vs. historical predictions based on their accuracy.
For replenishment strategies analysis, a full range of standard replenishment policies are supported on both client and server:
- Bucket,
- Rate-based,
- KanBan.
Beyond simulation, Inventory Optimiser is able to automatically optimise the parameters required by each of these policies based on the available data.
Forecasting, seasonality handling and customer service:
Thanks to its sophisticated forecasting algorithms, detailed, accurate model of your supply chain, and real-time information and reporting, Inventory Optimiser is able to maximise your customer service without the need for excessive stock or administrative work.
For the above reasons, together with the advanced, seasonal replenishment optimisation, Inventory Optimiser is able to cut stocks by typically 20% without any adverse impact on service. This reduction also brings about a commensurate benefit in reduced obsolescence and reduced damage.
Open and user-friendly environment:
Inventory Optimiser is a distributed application with a main server component that automatically updates its own database from your ERP or warehouse management system. This central server component also uses your customer’s forecasts and its own forecasts based on historical data to determine the optimal replenishment strategy to use for each SKU.
Based on these strategies, automatic replenishment orders are mailed out to the relevant people. Also a wide range of reports about what goes on in the supply chain at any given time can be made visible to customers and supplier via the internet.
Alongside the central server component Inventory Optimiser provides you with a number of client applications that not only allow detailed visibility of the different forecasts and accuracies, the warehouse levels, expected and received orders for each SKU but also what kind of strategies are used to calculate replenishment orders.
Interactive analysis:
In addition, the client offers a highly realistic simulation of warehouse replenishment or even the wider supply chain. This enables the warehouse manager to: - Play out “what-if” scenarios regarding issues ranging from changing strategy parameters (e.g. safety stock) to taking on new customers,
- Examine impacts on KPIs (e.g. service level, transport, etc.),Generate optimal replenishment strategies and parameter sets.
As a conclusion Inventory Optimiser helps to better understand and master the warehouse replenishment strategies with on-line, off-line, automated or interactive simulation and optimisation, in order to adjust stocks, control supply chain costs and service efficiency.
|
