IBS Sales and Operations Planning software gives you the ability to review and balance customer demand against supply resources over an agreed time period. The clarity helps you understand performance and take defined actions to help your business hit targets for inventory, turnover, service level and lead-time.
It’s a fact of wholesale distribution life that it takes years to build customer loyalty but only seconds to lose it. When you operate in a fast-moving distribution business, handling thousands of products with short life cycles, and you are running a lean inventory so you can offer keen prices, it seems unfair that single broken promise can cost you a customer. But it can.
IBS Sales and Operations Planning helps you understand the supply of, and demand for your products so that you can be confident in the information you give to customers. It calculates your capacity to supply and enables you to simulate different scenarios of supply and demand to check that you will be able to maintain customer service.
- It calculates your capacity to supply now and in the future.
- It enables you to set and monitor inventory turnover targets to maximize revenue.
- You can manage service levels to make sure you look after your best customers.
- You can check that inventory stays within limits and avoid shortages.
- You can impose lead-time targets on your suppliers or your own manufacturing operation.
Large-scale forecasting
Sales and Operations planning is a core function of the IBS Enterprise suite. It works with Demand Planning and Supply Planning functions to provide forecasts on demand for various products and your suppliers’ ability to meet that demand. Sales and Operations Planning helps formulate operational plans, feeding in data, from storage constraints to lead-time targets, to simulate accurate planning.
Once you have settled on a strategy, you can deliver feedback for more precise forecasts. This can be an iterative process, going back and forth to fine-tune. But the software is easy and intuitive to work this way. With IBS Planner View you can open multiple windows to see the effect of various plans on different parts of your operation.
Costing your plans
It is important, as part of the planning process, that you can simulate the effect of any changes on cost.
- You can fine tune purchase volumes against the resources you have available in the warehouse.
- You can simulate any number of plans and compare their performance so you choose the best.
- You can analyze how your plans operate in practice.