Supply chain planning maintains the balance between a number of aspects of customer demand and resources (supply, production and distribution capacity, stocks), in line with the company’s industrial and commercial guidelines.

The performance of the supply chain planning processes determines the command of working capital requirements and customer service levels, both under typical conditions and in circumstances demanding increased agility (growth, change of cycle).

Significantly improving the performance often involves overhauling all or parts of the supply chain planning processes:

• S&OP (medium- to long term balance between capacity, stocks and demand)
• Demand management (drawing up the sales forecasts, demand plan and consumption by orders)
• Stock management (definition of objective stock levels by article segment and location, according to their objective service level and the reactivity of the upstream chain)
• DRP (distribution requirements planning, deployment of stocks in the downstream network)
• Production management (multi- and mono-site master production schedules, scheduling)

The application of the above processes varies significantly according to the company’s supply chain model(s):

• shared ownership of processes between manufacturing / sales / marketing / supply chain, ownership of arbitration with regard to resources or demand and the model of collaboration between departments,
• location of arbitration on demand or resources in the processes,
• the form of the contract between upstream manufacturing and distribution (stock targets, quantities / dates, etc.),
• interactions between processes (e.g., application of sales forecasts to the sales plan produced by the S&OP, direct link between the DRP and PMS, or decoupling by stocks, etc.),
• supply chain segmentation (product / customer groupings, etc.) that determines the processes, with strong needs for homogenization.

Argon Consulting helps its customers in:

• the characterization of their supply chain model(s) according to the complexity of supply and demand management and the associated governance principles,
• the segmentation of the company’s product-service portfolio into coherent segments in terms of supply chain management, which is a key step in reducing the upstream complexity of processes and aligning the players with the target,
• the overall design of the processes and their application according to the various identified supply chain segments,
• and their degree of integration with the processes:
  • at a high level (budgets and plans, industrial strategy),
  • at a lower level (order taking and allocation to finished product stocks, management / execution / tracking of supplies, production, distribution and transport),
• assistance in making the right choices and support in the implementation of the information systems that support the defined processes (APS or ERP modules), in terms of project management, detailed design of processes and the selection of the control, prototyping and change management rules.