Rethinking the Supply Chain

Rethinking the Supply Chain

One Network has delivered and continues to enhance and develop an approach to supply chain planning that we believe corresponds closely to what leading analysts, thought-leaders, and technology visionaries predict will become the new standard.

In particular, we agree with the observation that hierarchical and serial planning (where broad aggregate planning is done up-front) is at best insufficient and at worst misleading.

The problems with the traditional hierarchical planning approaches are several:

• Planning is done at a broad aggregate level. However, ‘reality’ is much more detailed and real problems occur at a detailed level. (e.g. Product Family planning vs. Single item-at-a-single-location planning)
• Planning is done over a long time horizon. However, the reality is constantly changing and many if not most of the assumptions made are invalidated by the time ‘now’ shows up.

The reason why planners spend most of their time in spreadsheets doing low value-added work is that their planning tools don’t help them with the here-and-now.

As a result, they are forced to make-do which typically involves a lot of spreadsheets, emails, and calling back-and-forth.

What is needed is a framework that supports near-term execution as well as long-range planning.

However, near-term execution requires an entirely different concept as well as the architectural approach.