Supply Chain Planning Software ? Key to Successful Management of Supply Chain

Posted by Drew Larson on September 22nd, 2016

Successful supply chain management requires consistent improvements on a daily basis. Working with obsolete and archaic software slows down the business and prevents day-to-day operations from functioning efficiently. In such situations, it becomes essential to optimize supply chain management. One needs to synchronize and collaborate integrated planning, optimization of resources, monitoring, and response time to address the challenges of managing complex industry supply chain processes.

An organization must have an integrated platform for all its core planning processes so that the organization is agile and prompt to react to changing conditions.

Supply chain planning software helps improve working capital efficacy and optimize critical business areas such as manufacturing, inventory, warehouse management, order fulfillment and logistics. Every successful organization opts for supply chain visibility solutions across various industry platforms and uses these to provide excellent service and product quality.

An effective supply chain planning software provides real-time visibility and critical data on material flows, inventory positions and demand-supply across the entire supply chain. With the help of strong and effective supply chain planning software, one can make crucial decisions to adjust and adapt to changes in the production schedule. An important role of successful supply chain planning software is that it maintains a seamless functioning of the demand oriented supply network. It constantly helps analyze and improve purchasing activities that help an organization to adapt to dynamic market forces. This further helps in the development of long-term plans that enable a business to take advantage of strategic purchasing opportunities.

Using supply chain planning software is fundamental to maintaining an optimized supply chain as it highlights accurate sales forecasts that lead to efficiency in all business processes such as demand-supply, sales and operations planning and production scheduling. It makes use of statistical and collaborative forecasting process to create the most precise forecast possible. This results in higher customer satisfaction, lower inventory levels and optimized production.

Supply chain planning software helps maintain a balanced and a synchronized demand and supply system that facilitates various inventory and financial goals of an organization along with the manufacturing capacities and supply chain constraints.

Manufacturing based industries are required to respond swiftly to ever changing conditions, fluctuating costs and customer demand. This is where supply chain planning software helps mitigate roadblocks and enable businesses to reposition inventories and accordingly change production schedules.

Supply chain planning software helps an organization to act proactively whenever there is an unplanned and unexpected situation and helps the business to recover smoothly and quickly with minimum disruption.

About the Author

o9 Solutions has built an Intelligent Decision Management Platform for Visibility, Analytics, Planning, Collaboration, and Continuous Improvement across Sales, Supply Chain, Product Innovation, Integrated Business Planning & more. Its system that changes when the business changes. Management made smart, simple, and fun.