It’s your least favourite time of the month: Ordering time. You spend hours, if not days doing mundane, soul destroying work:
- Gather all the sales figures for all the products from a supplier
- Attempt to do some kind of forecast, taking into account seasons and trends
- Guess what kind of safety margin you should build in, because you don’t trust your forecast, or your supplier
- Check what stock you still have on-hand, and offset it with firm orders from customers
- Take the lead time for delivery into account
- Take minimum order quantities, order multiples, or other supplier constraints into account
By the time you have all this information together in the mother-of-all Excel spreadsheets, it’s out of date.
Your life can be so much simpler
Instead of fighting spreadsheets every week, imagine if you could press a button, and the perfect order for a supplier shows up on your screen.
No matter how complex your supply chain is, you want the perfect order at every point in the chain:
- Fill the shelves in all your retail outlets
- Have your DC stocked precisely to supply your retail stores
- Assemble the right amount of finished good in your manufacturing locations to supply the DC
- Order the correct amount of raw materials from external suppliers, even if they have long lead times, to keep the manufacturing plant going
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you knew that every ordering decision at every one of those point are optimal, and driving you towards your ideal stocking policy?