Are you striving for agility and resilience amid endless plan changes? Is your company’s approach to being responsive primarily an energy-sapping daily firefight? The solution may lie in understanding the root causes of these constant changes and strengthening your mid-term planning process and solutions.
As external shocks sweep through every corner of today’s supply chain, practitioners are under tremendous pressure to respond accurately, de-fuse supply chains and increase capacity. The lack of a strong mid-term planning process leaves organizations stuck in an endless cycle of last-minute operational plan changes. Disconnected business processes, organizational silos, and outdated technology are now even greater obstacles to successful implementation. How can manufacturers solve this to be more agile and responsive?
A strong medium-term, tactical planning process bridges the transition from long-term strategic plans to short-term operational timelines. It offers actionable plans that respond to frequent changes and provide much-needed supply chain resiliency. It should also enable teams to perform rapid planning of what-if scenarios.
Medium-term planning must capture the capacity availability of the production line and use it accurately at various levels of product group aggregation. It should be optimized to balance service, inventory and capacity goals. The result is a plan that’s planned and executed more realistically, with fewer gaps that necessitate the dreaded firefight.
Doing this manually in Excel is almost impossible due to the complexity required to properly model operational constraints. However, AI offers an excellent approach to provide the necessary skills.
This e-book explores the importance of medium-term planning, its core building blocks, and the role technology plays in enhancing it. It also examines why focusing on tactical planning will help supply chain practitioners reduce the number and magnitude of firefights in the planning and execution time horizon.
Please CLICK HERE to download the white paper.
