More questions about organizational design, capability building, and how to take your organization and employees along the transformation journey? Reach out to our expert Bart Paridaen!

The post Design your future supply chain organization appeared first on EyeOn.

By visualizing different parts of your planning process within an interactive PowerBI dashboard, you can easily track the development and, when necessary, steer it into the right direction.

During our webinar on July 7, 2022 we presented a planning framework with accompanying project reporting and capacity planning dashboards that provide an overview and interactive visualization of the different levels of planning and the planning processes:

Explore our dashboards:

• Project planning dashboard
• Capacity planning dashboard

The post Set up and track an effective project planning and control process appeared first on EyeOn.

This is an article by the Supply Chain Magazine. Read it here in Dutch!

“If you look at the past few years, there are two developments that organizations have to deal with: For one, COVID-19 has made consumer demand more volatile and uncertain than ever before. Three or four years ago, organizations were already experiencing changes, but it often happened step by step. Volatility has now taken on a whole new dimension,” says André Vriens.

Uncertainty in the supply chain

“Furthermore, we see that the uncertainty on the supply side has also increased enormously in the past year and even more so in recent months. Due to developments in the market, raw materials are no longer reliably available, and organizations are faced with price increases or are struggling, for example, with finding containers. That has to do with the war in Ukraine, but events like the blockade in the Suez Canal or a strike in a port also have an impact.”

End-to-end insight into the supply chain

“The first step that organizations can take to meet these challenges is to gain insights”, says Vriens. “What is the biggest challenge for your company? And what happens there? We call that end-to-end insights. Try to understand the consequences of the volatility of demand for your organization and your supply chain. How can I be more flexible and agile, when supply becomes unpredictable?”

There are several possible solutions, explains Vriens: “For example, if you have parts produced in Asia and goods do not arrive on time, should I operate closer to home? Or do I need to create buffers? Or do I have to make other agreements with supply chain partners? By creating end-to-end transparency, you understand whether your current supply chain setup is still smart.”

Developing scenarios on how to manage the supply chain

The second step in finding solutions is to connect your forecast and planning with the insights you gained in step two. “How do you ensure the best possible forecast? We know that it is not completely accurate anyway, but it does allow you to create scenarios on how you could manage your supply chain. How can you take the uncertainties into account as best as possible?”

Advanced models can help you overcome your challenges, but implementing a model or system alone is not the answer. The idea that good people who can work well with Excel are the solution is also outdated, says Vriens. “And you cannot expect a system to be able to calculate the correct scenarios if the basic data is not in order or incomplete.”

Knowledge and experience in forecasting and planning

To help organizations with these challenges, EyeOn offers knowledge and experience in the field of forecasting and planning, says Vriens. “We help companies with end-to-end transparency, creating a roadmap for digitalization, developing models, and developing capabilities. We help people grow their knowledge by facilitating master classes, for example.”

Vriens is positive about the coming year: “The field is becoming increasingly important and is also receiving more and more attention from C-level. In addition, you see that organizations are increasingly focusing on how they can extract more value from data. Especially now that the labor market is under tension, it is good to see how data can help you. It is therefore not without reason that more than a third of our organization consists of data scientists.”

Learn more about supply chain resilience on our website! We often discuss how to deal with disruptions in our webinars and events. Check our event calendar!

The post Supply chain uncertainty: How to be more flexible? appeared first on EyeOn.

Increase internal awareness of the environmental impact of the supply chain

At EyeOn, we have developed an interactive business game that allows your team to develop a better understanding of the connection between supply chain planning and sustainability in a fun and interactive way.

The business game focuses on showcasing how you can prevent waste and obsoletes using insights. Within the game, the player will explore dynamically the effects that factors such as forecast, production, and inventory management have on managing obsoletes. In the course of the game, the players will become more aware of the impact that supply chain decisions have on the environment. They will learn how visual insights can help them reduce this impact.

The experience will ultimately allow the player to choose an optimal solution that balances economic profit, environmental impact, and service level. This game can act as a stepping stone to generate conscience and understanding of the dynamics between planning and sustainability and will bring us closer to a more sustainable future.

Ready to play?

Participants will work together, leveraging their unique skills and expertise, to overcome sustainability challenges and achieve shared sustainability goals. By enhancing communication and fostering strong relationships, your project team will emerge as a unified force, driving positive
change and delivering sustainable outcomes.

Our supply chain sustainability game is the perfect platform to kickstart your journey towards a greener and more responsible supply chain. Participants will be immersed in the world of sustainable supply chains, where they will face real-world scenarios and make critical decisions.

Interested in the sustainable value chain game? Contact us now!

The post Understanding the environmental impact of supply chain decisions appeared first on EyeOn.

Balancing demand and supply is a challenge for many companies which even in relatively stable times may necessitate working with different scenarios. COVID-19-related issues and geopolitical turbulences in Europe and Asia put even more pressure on organizations to develop or further mature scenario modeling capabilities. When taking on this challenge, three angles should be considered:

• Monetizing the scenarios
• Embedding the scenarios in your S&OP/IBP process
• Using the proper tools

Financialize your decisions

When you want to move to scenario modeling you need to be able to assess the trade-offs between the different scenarios. Making them financial makes comparison possible.

Make use of the different operational plans that are already being created in your organization. Plans like the marketing plan, sales plan, supply plan, or factory plan contain key drivers that function as leading indicators. Market growth or share, price positioning, order book, installed base, or sales volume can be key drivers impacting your net sales. Factory cost price, manufacturing efficiency, freight, and handling costs can be leading indicators that impact your cost of goods sold. Moving down the profit and loss account below ‘integral gross margin’, you will also be able to find key value drivers in existing operation plans.

Demand fluctuations are the driving force behind projections on revenue and variable costs. A proper tool allows you to create business rules that help you relate fluctuations in demand to effects on profit and loss, balance sheets, and cash flow items. You will need to identify more drivers and create more business rules to complete the picture. But playing with simple demand scenarios (like ‘low’, ‘most likely’, and ‘high’) is often the starting point because it usually has a big influence on multiple line items. Once you have created the model, you can run it multiple times playing with the drivers, and easily compare different scenarios.

Upgrade your S&OP/IBP process with supply chain scenario planning

The key is to (re-)design your process so you periodically take a snapshot of your operational systems which, using a set of predefined business rules, can function as a starting point for making monetized S&OP/IBP plans.

To be able to create these monetized plans you need (more) involvement of the finance or control department in your S&OP/IBP process. Controllers become partners in business, no longer only explaining what happened but helping the organization to anticipate on what is likely going to happen, moving from being primarily reactive to becoming more proactive – the objective of supply chain scenario planning.

Because of its nature of crossing functional borders, the S&OP/IBP process is the most logical place to house supply chain scenario planning capabilities. Organizations that have a proper S&OP/IBP process in place typically create several scenarios where they play with the drivers that determine the success of the organization. They play with volume, price, quality, and mix of the raw materials used and products sold and, for example, the allocation of quantities to different factories. This results in gradually getting a feeling for what is really important, where the risks and opportunities are. Continuous integrated demand and supply alignment, supported by dedicated supply chain scenario planning, is an effective way to evaluate risks in a structured way and determine mitigating actions.

Consider a fast planning tool to support

To effectively and efficiently build scenarios and play with these during the S&OP/IBP process you need a tool that allows you to do so. We see different levels of tool support:

Most immature are often homegrown systems to support specific planning tasks and are basically structured Excel with macros and automated up and downloads. They can be cheap, fast, and provide a close to the user experience, but become slower with increased amounts of data to process, difficult to maintain, labor-intensive (making them less cheap in the end), and error-prone.

On the other side of the tooling landscape, we see advanced planning systems. These are integrated planning systems supporting and optimizing various planning processes like demand planning, production planning, and S&OP from vendors like SAP, Infor, JDA, OMP, Kinaxis, and O9. These have rich functionality, but are complex, expensive, and require IT for implementation. They are considered a long-term solution covering a wide array of planning capabilities.

If you don’t want to build something in Excel because of its drawbacks, but also don’t want the complexity of an advanced planning system, there is an alternative combining the best of both worlds: fast planning tools. A flexible platform that allows to build apps to support specific planning processes. Examples are Anaplan, Jedox, and Board. They provide scalable functionality and are cloud-based. Fast planning tools feel like ‘structured Excel’ and allow a business-driven implementation, without heavy IT involvement and at relatively low investment costs. They bring scenario modeling, design, and implementation close to the end-user, allowing rapid implementation, and changes to the model can also be realized quickly.

How we can support you in optimizing your supply chain scenario planning

We hope this article gives you a good base to start building and playing with scenarios. If you want to know more check out our content on S&OP/IBP and planning solutions!

This is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of digitalization and advanced analytics.

The post How to focus on scenarios in your supply chain planning appeared first on EyeOn.

Companies have become aware that to understand and be able to deal with intricate and erratic markets, they need high-quality planning. Performed by a supply chain team of well-educated and highly skilled planners. And talent is hard to find. Supply chains face severe labor shortages and a war on talent.

Turn your challenge into an opportunity for future success. Our experts recommend the following actions to grow excellent planning teams:

Offer your supply chain team role-based learning and training

Ensure retention. Grow the skills of your current forecasting and planning professionals (on both operational and managerial levels). Reflect on the latest academic frameworks and industry best practices. Train them how to define and execute sustainable improvements themselves to increase quality, speed, and effectiveness in planning processes.

Develop next-generation planning capabilities

Data is all around us. Applying data science to planning and forecasting helps to make better decisions, faster. Prepare your organization for smart-touch planning processes, in which data scientists leverage advanced techniques where it adds value. And supply chain planners are enabled to focus on key products where their expertise is most needed and has the highest impact.

Consider outsourcing business processes

Connecting with specialized external parties in process execution is an attractive alternative to improve forecasting and planning performance, increase process efficiency and relieve worries on missing advanced analytics skills. Grab business benefits immediately while your in-house planning capability grows steadily due to training and on-the-job coaching.

Boost your supply chain team with interim professionals

Are your supply chain planners overloaded? Are you in the middle of an organizational transition and in need of temporary additional planning power? Skilled and experienced interim planners help you deal with your operational planning challenges to get back on track again.

We are here for you!

EyeOn’s experts offer masterclasses for forecasting and planning professionals (on both operational and managerial levels). Check our curriculum for dates and classes!
Or outsource activities to our Planning Services. Find out how advanced analytics-as-a-service can lighten your load instantly!

This is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of digitalization and advanced analytics.

The post How to develop your supply chain team and attract planning talent appeared first on EyeOn.

When it comes to production planning, the need for balancing flexibility and stability is crucial in a wide range of industries. On the one hand, companies strive to remain flexible in order to match customer demand. On the other hand, there is a need for the leveling of production to create stability and operate efficiently. Often, manufacturers apply batch logic for their planning. It is, however, possible to step towards leveled production and to produce in line with customer demand at the same time. This simultaneously creates the stability essential in driving a virtuous circle of standard work, continuous improvement and increased performance. Production wheels can be used to realize this.

A production wheel is a method to schedule the production in a regularly repeating sequence. By integrating demand over a certain period of time and leveling production in this time period, a production wheel aims to balance the need for flexibility and the need for efficiency.

Two-step method for designing optimal production wheels

Existing methods for designing production wheels are often suboptimal and rely on manual judgement. The method developed by EyeOn, however, applies analytical models for the design and optimization of production wheels. The method consists of the following two steps:

1. Allocate all products to dedicated production lines or machines based on changeover costs. A ‘randomized variable neighborhood search’ is applied to find a good solution to this problem.
2. Develop a repeating, cyclical production plan for each production line or machine. By balancing inventory costs and changeover costs, a genetic algorithm finds high-quality production wheels.

Case study: Applying the EyeOn production wheel method in a large multinational (process industry)

We performed a case study to test the proposed methodology for designing production wheels. In a production setting with multiple machines and a broad product mix, we proved that the proposed models perform well in designing a cost-efficient production wheel. Our method decreased the quarterly costs by 10.0% compared to an earlier customized production wheel developed by EyeOn and by 39.5% in comparison with the existing production plan of the company in question.

Balancing inventory and changeover costs is key in designing production wheels. By decreasing batch sizes, the proposed method finds a better balance than the benchmark production plans. A production plan with smaller batches and more changeovers leads to higher costs of changeovers but greatly reduces inventory costs (see figure). In the end, this results in significantly lower total costs.

Conclusion

Production wheels enable you to create stability and regularity while remaining flexible towards your customers. But developing production wheels can be a complex task. Simple heuristics with manual judgements are only a first step towards a high-quality production plan. Therefore we developed this new analytical approach using optimization algorithms to best support you in developing production wheels.

For more information feel free to contact us or reach out to Dan Roozemond directly!

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This is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of the digitalization and advanced analytics.  

Our experts have identified five key trends for 2022.

Turn challenges into opportunities by clicking through our 5 key trends:

The post Let’s tackle the supply chain challenges of 2022! appeared first on EyeOn.

Marco van Alfen, IBP expert: “I know examples of companies that have purchased very expensive software for forecasting, but in the end do not dare to trust what the system prescribes. It doesn’t happen by itself. If you want to do this well, you have to invest in data, people, systems and processes.”

Learn the four steps to create a data-driven culture in Alex van Groningen’s article (in Dutch) with Marco van Alfen, Sr. Business Consultant and IBP expert at EyeOn.

Read more about forecasting and planning!

The post More accurate forecasting: Invest in data-driven culture! appeared first on EyeOn.

While everyone was (and still is) working from home, the paper industry is booming. People use at-home delivery more and more, which leads to increasing demand on all sorts of paper and packaging including carton boxes and wrapping paper. This has led to a shortage of paper, of which we see the effects right now!

Companies in the paper industry are striving for efficiency and lean planning solutions to guarantee the supply to their customers. To minimize the increase in costs and ensure availability towards the consumer market, accurate mid- and long-term planning is essential. This can for example be achieved by improving forecasting accuracy and implementing sales and operations planning.

How to ensure the holiday season goes as planned for your customers and your business?
Our team of forecasting and planning specialists are happy to help. Contact us now!

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