The people who work for On Board Intelligence are experts in the latest techniques in statistics, mathematics, operations research and artificial intelligence, all of which are applied to the discipline in which we have been working with several clients for the last twenty years, supply chain planning.
The solutions we offer to the market are characterized by requiring a minimal human intervention and that is to define strategies and monitor the results of these policies. Planning Studio 100 is not a support decision system, but a system that takes decisions on purchasing, manufacturing and / or distribution to optimally execute policies and strategies defined by the company.
We also implement the latest computer technologies to provide Planning Studio 100 integration and computing capabilities never experienced before, millions of SKU's per hour. Whether this computing power is required for simulation purposes, or for real life information, this comprehensive, intelligent and accurate calculation capacity, is vital right now and even more so in the future. The amount of information generated and recorded by companies follows an exponential curve and therefore the ability to analyze and make the best decisions based on profiled strategies becomes a true competitive advantage.
Planning Studio 100 is a very high performance Complex Adaptive System (CAS) whose area of expertise is supply chain planning.
Demand Forecasting
Planning Studio 100 generates models to forecast demand and sales that can be parameterized in these four areas:
-
Information to use in the model
Using customer orders or tickets from POS as raw materials, Planning Studio 100 builds a demand forecast taking into account not only the history, but any other variable that the user is able to register in time, such as price, number of shelves on which it is displayed at the store, or any other index.
-
Forecast Periodicity
Planning Studio 100 allows the user to generate forecasts for any period, from the most commonly used monthly forecasting, down to weekly, daily or even a period of N days, where N is decided by the user.
-
Model Aggregation level
This detailed analysis of customer orders or POS data enables Planning Studio 100 to generate forecasts at any level of aggregation of information from product and store or geographic area to much more complex structures that map demand with supply sources.
-
Units of measurement
At the same time, Planning Studio 100 can work in any unit of measure at SKU level, to those that allow data aggregation such as cost, price, pallets, weight.
Before considering any model and calculating a forecast, Planning Studio 100 identifies data features that assure that the most suitable methods are applied. Planning Studio 100 uses different techniques if data is sparse (slow moving items) than for high volume items (e.g. fast moving consumer goods). At the same time, algorithms suitable for short lead times should not be used for long one.
Planning Studio 100 forecasting technology makes use of multi layered models so that the calculated forecast considers different targets. Short term forecasting is used to generate the next supply order and as such the main goal is to minimize the error. However, long term forecasting main target, used for business planning, is to minimize changes in the forecast or maximize stability.
Service and Inventory Optimization
Planning Studio 100 allows companies to establish policies and inventory strategies aimed at maintaining a high level of customer service (fill rate) at the lowest possible cost.
To establish these policies, the first step is being able to accurately answer the question "How much inventory is required to achieve a customer service level of 97%?" Taking into account not only the history of what has been demanded or sold, but many other factors, among which lead time variation is key. This is very different from executing inventory policies to maintain N days of coverage or the so-called statistical safety stocks. If for fast moving skus the difference is substantial, for the so called slow moving skus, the difference is at least of one order of magnitude or even higher, and obsolescence levels are the symptom of the disease.
Customer service level is usually a strategic variable that the user indicates to Planning Studio 100. However it is also possible that this variable is determined based on a set of economic objectives among which are the cost of carrying the inventory and the improvement on customer service.
If at the same time the supply chain is composed of several factories that supply to other stores that serve the end customers, service and/or inventory optimization for that multi echelon network is the next target for which Planning Studio 100 will perform a unique job due to its intelligence and analytical skills, that are run daily. It is not the same to analyze each SKU in its own, than to apply a global vision to find an optimal solution that meets the objectives of the organization while minimizing the total inventory investment.
Supply planning
If you want to provide your organization with a system that goes beyond the MPS/MRP, Planning Studio 100 is the system you are looking for. Planning Studio 100 generates a plan that not only takes into account end customer forecasted demand/sales or requirements from other stocking locations, but also these other types of demand:
-
Extraordinary demand
Known demand out of the forecast like customer orders whose delivery date is in the future and its quantity is so large that it is not included in the forecast.
-
Dependent Demand
Demand generated by the consumption of components in a bill of materials structure.
-
Successors Demand
Demand generated due to item and/or SKU replacement.
Planning Studio 100 is capable of solving dynamically problems with alternative supply sourcing . For example, the default rule is that store X is replenished from factory A, but if factory A is not able to allocate all demand, it is likely that the store X is supplied from other stores or factories.
Planning Studio 100 has full visibility of the supply chain and the origin of each requirement and can be parameterized so that inventory shortages (sharing of misery), generate a supply plan that meets certain goals or prioritize some demands over others.
Distribution Planning
Planning Studio 100 can model any type of multi echelon supply chain networks, performing automatic replenishments of stores, outlets or regional distribution centers. It makes a difference between those network points in which backorder is allowed to those in which the lack of inventory is a lost sale. In he first ones, demand data is used and in the others sales (POS) and stock data is used.
If your organization is still modeling and forecasting with the same data stores and central warehouses, using sales as if they were demand (customer orders) and you want to improve this situation, Planning Studio 100 will generate a much more accurate forecast taking into account the inventory (or lack thereof) in the replenishment process. if sales are zero, it is not the same, if there were stock than when there were not.
Using artificial intelligence techniques Planning Studio 100 has been taught to solve complex situations in which the renewal of the product catalog is continuous and products / SKUs have a very limited life time, never more than three months. In these cases, it is able to learn analyzing all the information in the ERP and identify the initial stock and its subsequent adaptation to actual sales taking into consideration the stock levels.
If the selling points of your company generate demand and not sales (customers allow backorders), Planning Studio 100 dynamically resolves inventory transfers between stores instead of resupply from the distribution center, something which should happen only in extraordinary situations, but in which Planning Studio 100 rules engine is used to solve this critical situations.
If anything characterizes distribution networks, is the huge amount of data to process times the number of stores and products that are marketed, so Planning Studio 100 is able to calculate tens of millions of SKUs in very few hours.
Sales & Operations Planning
Sales & Operations Planning is a process to generate a plan that balances demand with supply providing a fully integrated financial vision within day-to-day operations. For the management of any organization is a strategic tool that allows to anticipate future events and resolve them before it rises as a problem.
If your organization has already implemented an S&OP process, it is quite common that the implementation takes quite a long time, starting with the demand plan during the first week, following the supply plan and holding the S&OP meeting later. Planning Studio 100 can shorten this process so that the plans are develop during the first days of the month and the S&OP meeting can be held no later than the 4th of every month.
Planning Studio 100 has gone a step further and includes the inventory, changing its name to Sales, Inventory & Operations Plannning (SI&OP). It allows to generate and save daily plans are compared them with reality simplifying the measurement of execution capacity of the organization.
In this SI&OP process, Planning Studio 100 anchors customer service measurement as the main goal, so that we not only have a financial snapshot of integrated supply and demand, but also the service achieved day to day, along with the inventory.
Because not every company is the same, Planning Studio 100 SI&OP functionality can be adapted to the requirements of each company and not just from the point of view of reporting and charting, but also mobility, so that you can get the data in all types of mobile devices from the laptop to smartphones.
Vendor Management Inventory
Planning Studio 100 allows organizations to implement vendor managed inventory strategies with customers to automatic replenish inventory to meet customer service levels agreed in the SLA (Service Level Agreement) while optimizing inventory investment at the same time.
Running a daily analysis of demand/sales by customer of each store in which inventory is managed, Planning Studio 100 generates an accurate forecast that takes into account not only the history but also other variables such as the availability of past stock and / or price. It also calculates optimal stock levels for the service level that has been set as a target and maximum stocks considering lot sizes, storage capacity and/or seasonal demand.
Considering transportation capacities, Planning Studio 100 generates daily distribution orders to each point of sale that are sent to ERP during the night so that the morning shift at the warehouse can prepare and send then to each customer.
If this process is developed inside a multi echelon supply chain network, Planning Studio 100 is able to apply all kinds of fair share allocation policies when there are inventory shortages at higher levels of the network that do not allow to cover demand at the lower levels. These strategies differently penalize backorder replenishment than stock ones.
Demand Sensing
The answer to the lack of accuracy of the forecast comes from the implementation of the latest Demand Sensing technologies that Planning Studio 100 performs for the analysis of what happened the day before. The exclusive use of time series forecasting has proved to be a good way to explain the past, but very inaccurate and slow to adapt to predict the immediate future.
Demand Sensing allows automatic modification of the short term forecast with respect to long term one that analyze far fewer variables.
Demand Sensing techniques incorporated in Planning Studio 100 allows the identification of sudden changes in demand patterns using the data of the last days and make automated decisions regarding previous forecasts, so that increases accuracy by at least 40%, which translates into a reduction of inventory of at least 15%.
Planing Studio 100 analyzes signals that are of two types:
-
Internal signals as extraordinary demand , changes in price and/or lead times or any other information of the own supply chain.
-
External signals such as weather information, indexes, promotional and activity of competitors.
The analysis carried out are different based on the information for which the forecast has to be improved, differentiating between that made of demand (where customers wait for orders) from stores sales (where the lack of stock generates a lost sale).
These changes in the forecast are immediately visible without the need to be revised (without human intervention) are used to generate a new plan whose orders are influenced by the changes introduced by the Demand Sensing.