Creating an optimal plan to meet demand is a significant step in more effectively managing your supply chain. Successful production planning, the ability to profitably manage business disruptions, separates companies who use their supply chains to their competitive advantage from those who can only explain “what happened” after it’s too late to respond.

In a matter of minutes, the Arkieva™ Supply Planner creates scenarios to help answer such questions as:

• Will we be able to cover demand if a shutdown continues?
• How soon should we begin building inventory to support an upcoming promotion? 
• What is the most cost-effective way to distribute our product?
• Can we accept a significant additional order without disrupting customer service?
• How should we respond to a spike in raw material costs?

Arkieva's Supply Planner is a comprehensive optimization tool for balancing supply and demand within corporate objectives in the face of change. Such optimization is a critical component of a world-class S&OP process. It also provides desktop capabilities to operations managers so they can quickly deal with change in a way that preserves both margins and customer service.

• Overall reduction in operating costs of up to 4%
• Fewer setups, increased throughput, and less costly overtime.
• Increased flexibility in manufacturing due to ability to quickly re-plan.
• Decision making that will be consistent with the goals and objectives of company S&OP targets.
• Sustainable reduction in inventories by up to 20% across the network.

Manage Change Profitably

Creating an optimal plan to meet demand is a significant step in more effectively managing your supply chain. The ability to profitably manage business disruptions separates companies who use their supply chains to their competitive advantage from those who can only explain “what happened” after it’s too late to respond.

The Arkieva Supply Planner is a comprehensive optimization tool for keeping supply aligned with corporate objectives in the face of change. It helps answer such questions as:

• Will we be able to cover demand if a shutdown continues?
• How soon should we begin building inventory to support an upcoming promotion?
• What is the most cost- effective way to distribute our product?
• Can we accept a significant additional order without disrupting customer service?
• How should we respond to a spike in raw material costs?

Flexibility and rapid turnaround are essential in a changing marketplace, whether evaluating new growth opportunities or managing costs.   The ability to quickly create profit-driven supply scenarios for contingency planning, in a sandbox environment, before committing resources is a key feature of the Arkieva Supply Planner.

Companies that invest time and effort to create agile, lean manufacturing environments reap benefits only if their planning is equally agile. Arkieva models the internal and external supply chain across the global enterprise – multi-site, multi-user, and enterprise wide.  It synchronizes material and capacity allocation with production and planned purchases, optimizing operations with true customer demand.

Arkieva provides flexible, ad-hoc reporting at any level of detail and stores past operations plans for later comparison.  In addition, all Arkieva reports can be sent to Microsoft Excel with a single click.  Arkieva integrates easily with most ERP and other transaction and execution systems, enabling global visibility of operations and supporting collaborative supply chain planning.