With the world changing at a faster pace than ever before, the need for organizations to be able to react quickly is drastically increasing. This impacts the way we design our business processes. In the complex environments of today, it is not enough to just have processes in place without system support. This was exactly the challenge one of our customers was facing; how to translate their processes into a planning solution that would not only support them today but would be able to grow with them as their requirements evolved. Europe’s leading medical supply distributor delivers more than 40,000 SKUs, ranging from mouth masks to hospital beds, and delivers to its customers across Europe from multiple distribution centers.
The challenge that we took on together with our customer was to design an integrated solution in Anaplan for demand planning, supply planning, inventory management, and the S&OE process for their footprint, all the while keeping in mind that this solution would later also support an S&OP/IBP process that would run on top of these processes and a rollout to other countries for the unique SKUs sold in their specific markets.
The overall solution implemented consists of three models:
There are several solutions implemented as part of the overall implementation that deserve some special attention:
More About Supply Planning:
At bluecrux, we’re big believers in the power of co-creation. This not only applies to model building, but also to the design phase. Before we started writing user stories we’ve spent time with the customer team on understanding their current processes, their struggles today, and how we can help make the life of planners easier and more productive. Laying the foundation of the user stories together, by bringing in supply chain planning expertise and challenging each other on the right way forward has resulted in delivering a powerful solution that forms the basis more many use cases in the future. This co-designing led to co-creation during modelbuilding and enabling model builders to expand on their models as their modelbuilding expertise developed. Modelbuilding together has proven to be a powerful tool in becoming self-sufficient and we now truly see a business owned planning tool that is maintained and expanded on by the model builders themselves.
Feedback from users has been very positive. The users value the user-friendliness of the solution and how easy it is to understand how to navigate the models. In comparison with many out of the box solutions from other software vendors, solutions in Anaplan do not have extensive menu structures for things that you do not really need. Planners indicated that they have all the information they need at their fingertips versus previously having to go to several systems to get the inputs they needed to create a plan. Supply Chain planning now takes place in a one-stop shop versus having multiple instances in place of the previous planning software that was in use. This allows creating a full overview of all SKUs being planned and reporting on one data set that is kept in Anaplan.
As the first solution has been put live the team is now looking ahead to implementing the S&OP layer on top to help drive planning scenarios and decisions. Taking control over the longer-term planning horizon to bring sales, supply chain, and operations together with connected planning.
Hendrik de Cuyper is a consultant and solution architect at bluecrux, responsible for sales for the Anaplan practice. Over the last two years, he has helped deliver various Anaplan use cases in the field of supply chain, covering demand & supply planning, inventory management, and S&OP implementations.
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