Supply & Demand Planning

In today’s fast-paced world of business, manufacturers who are able to fully understand their customers’ buying behaviors and quickly adjust to the fluctuating demand are the ones who will succeed. In order to plan their purchasing and production activities, manufacturers must reach as far into their value chains as possible to insure they are getting a complete picture of supply and demand.

According to Aberdeen, 90%+ of manufacturers still use spreadsheets for planning, scheduling, and forecasting. While this flexible tool enables manufactures to define complex measures and business logic, it falls short on collaboration and scalability. Boardwalktech offers supply and demand planners an Excel-based solution which lets them leverage the ubiquitous Excel environment for collecting input from all parts of the extended supply chain, but does so in a robust, reliable, collaborative and enterprise quality manner.

Supply and Demand Planning Challenges

Supply chain planners find it difficult to use a web based or thick client interface to navigate through and enter data across multiple data dimensions when updating thousands of measures for every weekly or monthly planning cycle

The distributed nature of the manufacturing chain means process participants are both at separate companies and “on-the-go,” so spending time chained to a specialized web-interface to interact with a planning system means less time working with customers

When field planners exchange spreadsheet-based data via email between multiple users and then manually consolidate the data for input into the demand management solution, a process choke point often develops and these non-collaborative spreadsheets end up not having current data and/or getting out of sync with the demand management solution

Manually consolidating input from planners is often a tedious, error-prone process that also requires manually versioning changes as they happen using “save-as”

Getting sales backlog and actuals data into an existing spreadsheet-based processes is difficult and requires parsing, sorting and matching data from backend systems into your spreadsheets and then distributing it to process participants who are then still not happy because they can’t easily tell what’s changed since the last “dump”

The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven Supply and Demand Planning

Boardwalktech has developed a Demand Planning Tool (DPT) which is a collaborative spreadsheet solution powered by the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP). DPT is a configurable, template-driven Excel environment that enables two-way exchange of planning data between the isolated Excel desktop user environment and a company’s supply and demand management solution.

Automation of manual processes; process experts have evolved & developed their spreadsheet-based process models using the power and flexibility of Excel. With these powerful, yet manual, processes, companies end up working with multiple versions of spreadsheets which are often linked together in static “shared drive” data silos. BCP can automate and connect all your existing manual spreadsheet-based planning processes

BCP lets extended planning participants continue to use spreadsheets so they retain the flexibility they’ve grown accustomed to and the ability to work in isolation, but you’re able to exchange data with them by simply clicking on a button

BCP makes all existing detailed planning information collaborative and readily available to all process participants. Detailed unit-driven production plans means companies are working with granular planning information including multiple products SKUs, prices, channels, and geographies across divisions and business units. There’s also continuously evolving business rules for discounts, pricing, availability, and costing information. All this information is easily managed with BCP since creating another column to capture a business parameter or adjusting a formula or a selection option is a snap and changes are automatically distributed to all participants

Change management and analysis; BCP changes “refresh” rather than replace process information as updates are made which makes understanding what’s changed very easy. BCP lets you compare any data measure to any other over any period of time

Real-time process information & visibility; BCP lets all participants work with real-time spreadsheet-based information. This means that changes made to their part of the supply and demand plan reflect the latest information

Unprecedented executive insight using existing tools; BCP lets management see what’s changing and why and lets them add their own assessment to the information and conduct what-if analysis to determine the impact of any changes on profitability. They are able to do this using a familiar & powerful business process modeling environment they are already familiar and comfortable with—the spreadsheet

Enterprise-quality, secure data management for spreadsheet-based processes; BCP lets you set up a single, secure, shared source of key planning data from existing spreadsheet-based processes that can now be made available across the extended enterprise, on-demand. This spreadsheet-based data can now be reliably integrated with your existing supply and demand planning systems enabling an enterprise quality planning process out to the furthest planning leaf

Benefits of using BCP for Supply and Demand Planning

BCP enables you to collect reliable data from all planning participants. Plans tend to be only as good as the input data

By eliminating the traditional “collaborative” spreadsheet process of “cut & paste, update, save-as, email, and repeat,” you’re able to save time and reduce errors

By reducing the time required to perform a process from days/hours to minutes, you’re able to spend more time performing the “what-if” analysis needed to improve operating performance

Changes made to any participant’s part of the supply and demand plan reflect the latest information from all other participants, such as the latest backlog and shipped data for planners, which makes the whole planning process more effective