Today’s ever-increasing supply chain complexity is outrunning

CP’s efforts to improve supply chain efficiency and effectiveness.

In short, the CP business challenge is growing ever more difficult, ever more demanding, and CP’s business management capabilities struggle to keep pace. Especially for the COO and the vice president-supply chain charged with increasing revenue and profit without sacrificing customer service, the key questions are:

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How do I increase revenue and profits without sacrificing customer service?

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How do I improve my demand visibility to keep the shelves stocked?

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How do I keep the inventory low by accelerating my supply response?

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How do I contain cost and ensure quality delivered by my manufacturing network?

The answer to all these questions is to better balance demand and supply within your own supply chain by working more effectively internally, and externally with suppliers and customers.

The way forward is to establish new levels of collaboration across functional, departmental and corporate boundaries. Distributed demand and supply planning that links all partners, facilities, and functionalities enables the CP company to establish collaborative supply chain planning as the organization’s modus operandi. It provides everyone with visibility, enabling quick response to problems

and opportunities, and shortening the lead time required to do so.

UNDERSTAND THE CP PAIN POINTS

The first step in building such a collaborative demand and supply planning capability is to understand the CP supply network pain points (summarized in the box on page 3) and, by contrast, what a winning demand and supply capability looks like (summarized in the box on page 4). Company leaders need to understand what is causing the pain points in their supply and demand network, and envision an overarching strategy “bridge” to greater efficiency and effectiveness.

In most CP companies today, executives who take a “macro” view of their supply network can see that costs are going up; that inefficiency is rampant on the operations level; and that it is very hard to balance capacity on an aggregate level –– and even on the brand and item level –– because poor visibility and long lead times inevitably sabotage the best efforts to forecast. In short, the winning demand and supply capability depicted on page 4 remains elusive.

CONSIDER STAKEHOLDER ALIGNMENT NEEDS

The second step is to understand what each key internal stakeholder needs.

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The COO wants to know: ‘How do I increase revenue and profits without sacrificing customer service?” KPIs: Revenue growth, operating margin, customer satisfaction.

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