This article presents a clear step-by-step approach to reducing your forecasting by up to 35%: collect and clean your data, use machine learning, and enrich your forecasts using the forecast value added framework. — Poor forecasts result in excess inventory, obsolete products, inappropriate long-term capacity planning, supplier tensions, shortages, and emergency expeditions. In short, they harm profitability, frustrate your teams, and waste resources. On the other hand, accurate forecasts will allow you to produce more effectively the required products, ship them on time where…

This article tackles the challenge of forecasting new products. First, we divide product introductions into three cases: new version, line extension, and brand-new products. Then propose methods to forecast demand in each case. — Businesses like to renew their product portfolio by releasing new versions of existing products or launching brand-new products. By providing new value propositions for consumers, companies hope to increase (or secure) market share and enjoy overall sales and profit growth. Unfortunately, forecasting new products is especially challenging for demand planners…

Developing a supply chain strategy supporting the company’s objectives is a prerequisite for effective S&OP. This article discusses how to create an effective supply chain strategy by defining the company’s competitive strategy, identifying Critical Success Factors (CSF), and defining Service Level Agreements (SLA). — Effective Supply Chain management is essential for companies to remain competitive and profitable in today’s fast-paced and dynamic business environment. A key element of successful supply chain management is to develop and implement supply chain strategies that align with the company’s overall objectives. A well-defined Supply Chain Strategy is a…

How much savings will we achieve if we improve forecasting accuracy by 10%? Supply Chain VPs around the world. Improving forecasting accuracy should help your inventory quality: you will have a better idea of what, when, and how much to produce. Ultimately, better forecasts mean higher service levels, lower inventory…

Businesses need accurate forecasts and adequate inventory policies to run their supply chains. But how important are they to reach service level targets while reducing total inventory (and costs)? No formula will answer this question. In this article, we (SupChains) will lay the framework that we will use to assess the impact of forecasting accuracy and adequate inventory policies. — Forecasting Accuracy: Does it Matter?

Inventory Planning Excellence is defined by the capacity to achieve more (high service levels) with low costs and low workload. This article will run through a 4-step process to achieve this excellence: 1. Service level strategy, 2. Automated execution, 3. Alerts and exceptions, 4. E2E control tower. — At the core of inventory planning processes lies the objective of serving customers (but not too much — more about this later) at the lowest costs with the lowest effort. As for demand planning, we want to achieve more (serve our customers better at the lowest cost) by working smarter…

Using cutting-edge machine learning models and a wide array of forecasting techniques, SupChains delivered a forecasting model that helped ChampionX, an international chemical manufacturer, to reduce their forecast error by 20% (compared to a benchmark). These results were achieved despite the lack of historical data and the absence of demand drivers. — Business Situation Enjoying a dominating position in the chemical and oil industry, our client, ChampionX, manufactures and distributes a wide array of chemical agents, products, parts, and exploration tools to other manufacturers. In 2021, ChampionX reported a total revenue of 3B$ doing business in over 60 countries with 7,000 employees.

Many supply chains serve promotion-driven markets. Including promotions in their forecasting models will drastically improve forecasting accuracy while reducing planners’ workload. This article discusses how promotions impact demand and which models to use to forecast promotion-driven products. — If you do business in a promotion-driven market, promotions most likely have a massive impact on demand. As they can be easily tracked and planned, they should be included in your model.

This is the second part of a supply chain optimization project. This second part focuses on inventory optimization. You can read the first part (about forecasting) here. Executive Summary In this two-part proof-of-concept, SupChains and DragonRitter (a forecasting-as-a-service platform) helped a Pharma Distributor to reduce its inventory while optimizing its…