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The Amitive How-To Guide to:
Higher Customer Service Levels, Lower Inventory
While we’ve all been schooled and have then for years operated under the “law” that these two have a direct relationship, we’re here to prove to you that, with Amitive, you can operate with these two in inverse. We’ll show you that you mostly certainly can have your cake and eat it too. And while there’s much to do, at Amitive we’ll also show you how you can act now and achieve these goals with ROI in less than six months. That’s right ROI < 6 months.
Do these five things and you can achieve your goals:
1. Synchronize "real" demand with "lean" supply
There are two problems with traditional supply and demand synchronization engines: 1) you need to focus on real demand, not simply forecasted demand, and 2) you need to match it with lean supply, not simply planned supply.
Real demand is based on periodically planned, then frequently updated forecasts directly from customers. Real demand consists of triangulated customer forecasts, market overlays, and real-time actuals.
Lean supply is based on real demand and considers time and every location of all types of inventory now and as real demand changes. The missing link is the planning engine’s responsiveness to align lean supply with that changing demand gracefully.
Amitive’s patent-pending demand/supply synchronization engine provides supply chain owners with an event-based planning system to collaborate around elastic supplier lead times and quantities to optimize each partner’s schedules and dependencies. Amitive is the first application to continuously synchronize supply and demand across the extended supply network. Planning is performed in event-driven, net-change incremental runs that are less taxing to perform and far less disruptive to the community resulting in practical optimization for higher service levels with lower costs. The result is higher customer service levels with lower inventory. Imagine that!
2. Enable data-driven decisions by deploying real-time analytics
Amitive centralizes business process and transaction data management for a multi-enterprise business network. Real-time, seamless business process management significantly increases productivity and efficiency across what is typically a mess of fragmented supply chain community processes and supporting heterogeneous business applications (or more likely – lots and lots of spreadsheets!). Automating end-to-end processes across departments and among trading partners removes latency and errors, and drives higher service levels with lower operating costs.
The real golden goose in this model is that when you get all your data in one place, you have the holy grail of real-time supply chain intelligence at your fingertips. With Amitive, now can you have the real-time, dynamic data for making tactical and strategic business decisions based on consolidated, rationalized, time-synced data.
3. Rapidly deploy / modify business processes
Amitive is configurable to the exact needs of your business and industry. It supports, rather than dictates, how you do business. Amitive has been built from the ground up to support end-to-end business processes seamlessly across departments, and importantly, across companies in a multi-enterprise business network. While many vendors can ultimately cobble together an end-to-end business process, Amitive is uniquely designed to support agility of the community so you can easily build and frequently modify multiple interdependent processes. Amitive flexes so you can simply add/subtracts customers, suppliers, products, and the such with the grace and ease to make your teams more productive, and your supply chain community more competitive. Amitive customization upgrades seamlessly. You can define your business processes to support your best practices without the constraints and headaches typical of traditional SCM solutions. With this flexibility, you don’t have to reengineer to conform to your vendors’ dictated processes and templates. It’s your business – run it your way!
4. Consolidate community data for global visibility
Amitive serves as the transaction data hub for planning, execution, and collaboration across your supply chain community. Amitive can manage your entire community—from customers, to suppliers, through Supply Chain Owner warehouses— in a single data repository. Based on this foundation, you can now get real-time, cross-community visibility and hierarchical demand/supply profiles. Amitive is a real-time system meaning orders, inventory, purchase orders, and the like are always up to date. Gone are the misguided decisions made (and indecision!) based on batch or manually (and latently) consolidated information.
5. Control supply chain risk – supply, demand, financial
With Amitive community supply chain management, delivered securely and flexibly in the cloud, you can significantly increase control over supply, customer service, and financial supply chain risks:
Supply Risk – by migrating and consolidating a community’s business processes, and centralizing data onto a secure global platform, you can significantly better control supply risk associated with quality, responsiveness (capacity and product velocity), and regulatory compliance.
Customer Service Risk – Amitive end-to-end processes and clear lines of cross-community visibility ensure your ability to have the right products in the right place at the right time coupled with the ability to proactively sense and respond to demand changes without triggering the dreaded bull whip effect. Through enhanced peer/peer relationships, you can also better ensure responsiveness to both urgent increases in demand and sudden drops in demand (e.g. the massive order cancellations we’ve seen in this recession) without financial ruin.
Financial Risk – The greatest financial risk in supply chain management lies with working capital. Today’s long supply chains, outsourced manufacturing’s majority of inventory tied up in finished goods, and shorter product lifecycles all contribute to higher in-transit inventory and long lead times, the latter presenting significant risk to inventory stockouts— due to underestimates or spikes in demand— and to excess and obsolescence from underperforming products and markets. Amitive’s unique planning and enhanced responsiveness support the ability to reduce and minimally sustain working capital tied up in inventory.
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