The right supply chain management solution can make a world of difference in ensuring that a company is able to anticipate and respond to disruption in its increasingly elaborate supply networks. To continually develop and refine their supply chain response efforts, companies need planning tools that can leverage advanced analytics and optimization algorithms. NetSuite Supply Chain Planning offers a number of sophisticated capabilities to help businesses balance both supply and demand. Inventory management and demand planning functionality, combined with a scheduling engine and AI-powered predictive analytics, equip supply chain leaders to perform data-informed supply chain response planning.
The software can generate a recommended schedule for purchasing or manufacturing items and suggest purchase and work orders based on lead times and expected demand. Armed with effective supply chain response planning tools, like NetSuite Supply Planning businesses can keep their product development and delivery processes running smoothly, even in the face of supply chain challenges, ensuring material availability and accurate production scheduling.
NetSuite’s supply chain control tower tool is specifically designed for supply chain response planning. Companies can use the module to simulate inventory supply and demand across their supply chain network, helping logistics teams analyze capacity and operations teams plan purchases and production schedules. The simulation displays a running balance of inventory, based on sales orders and future stock levels, and it illustrates how changes to the bill of materials or production processes will impact the business. Using the embedded predictive risk functionality, planners can explore how various responses will affect processes.
Greater visibility into key supply chain data, visualization of how all the moving parts affect one another and advanced analytics to identify emerging resource issues help companies respond to current supply chain dynamics. With the right tools, companies can determine the quickest and most profitable solutions to address problems.
The challenges of managing a variety of networks in today’s dynamic supply chain era is a tall order. Companies must focus not only on repairing supply chain problems in the moment, but also on looking ahead and preparing to respond to a broad range of future opportunities and risks. For most companies, this requires a digital transformation of supply chain management with a focus on response planning. Of course, this is tantamount to working on an airplane while it’s midflight.