Introduction and challenges
Achieving a flawless service rate, managing complex flows to the end customer, making cost and inventory trade-offs within multi-level organisations, collaborating with suppliers and customers on all continents, reducing lead times, aligning operational and financial cycles, improving reaction times to unexpected events… These are some of the many planning challenges companies face. The complexity of flows and organisations, the volume of data, the number of participants and the IT environment make APS (advanced planning systems) tools more essential than ever.
These tools constitute the true backbone of planning processes and organisations and are often a pre-requisite for achieving performance objectives. The APS offer is now mature; there are APS adapted to small companies that want to better integrate their operations, as well as ones suited to large organisations that want to manage a global supply chain in (almost) real time.
APS also make it possible to take advantage of the digital revolution to improve operations management, whether it is to better forecast with machine learning, or to implement real-time traceability of flows to react instantly to hazards.
How we can help
We have significant experience with the main systems on the market, across a range of sectors. We also review the existing APS available on an annual basis: location, sector experience, functional and technical differentiators in relation to the competition, etc. We assist our clients in all phases of an APS project:
- Benchmarking your planning function and tools, and comparing their use to best practice in your sector
- Identifying and quantifying the challenges, framing the guiding and organisational principles of your planning function, as well as the type of system that can meet your requirements
- Helping you choose the best tool for your needs and means
- Designing the target processes and organisations
- Collaborating with IT teams in the development and implementation of tools
- Supporting your teams during the transformation
- Identifying, designing and implementing the optimal digital technologies
- Improving your operational performance when replacing an old APS
- Revitalising an APS approach
- Improving the use of tools and business challenges faced by teams following a past project that was too technology-oriented
- Validating that performance gains have occurred following the implementation of a tool