Balancing the Global Supply Chain with QAD’s Enterprise Operations Planning

Posted on: March 8, 2010 | By: SuperUser Account | QAD Business Process

In today’s global economy, corporations must find ways to balance supply and demand not only across sites, but across the entire supply chain. QAD’s Enterprise Operations Planning has the functionality to do just this. QAD’s EOP uses actual Forecast, Sales, Production, and Inventory data to calculate a plan to support pre-defined target inventory levels and centralize the production planning and purchasing activities into a global Master Scheduling function.

The Enterprise Operations Plan module has the following utilities and functions:

• Demand import and consolidation from multiple sites and databases
(including external data sources)
• Integration with Resource Planning
• Planning at family and/or end-item levels
• Weeks of Coverage by effective date for Target Inventory Planning
• Source Matrix by effective date for supply and demand relationships between sites
• Allocation of production demands across sites and production lines by percentage
• Production demand transfer to other modules
• Simulation Planning
• KPI reporting

A typical process involves loading transactional data and calculating the Operations Plan. Master Schedulers can then use the Simulated Operations Plan to create an optimal plan and copy it to replace the system calculated plan. Once the Master Scheduler is satisfied with the Operations Plan it is exploded into Firm Planned Orders to drive the supply chain in the long-term timeframe. In the short term, these Firm Planned Orders are released into Advanced Repetitive Schedules, Discrete Work Orders, or Discrete Purchase Orders at the discretion of the Master Scheduler. At this point, the individual sites execute the supply chain activities driven by the centralized master scheduling of manufactured and purchased items.

QAD’s EOP closely resembles the classic APICS model of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), providing a means to integrate each element of the process into a single system. It is a perfect fit for high volume, make-to-stock environments looking for a link between long-term planning and short-term execution. Companies that truly use the S&OP process can benefit greatly by incorporating the EOP module within MFG/Pro into their strategic plan. In addition to optimizing target inventory and production levels throughout the supply chain, EOP can be used to project long-term labor, equipment, and cash needs and to develop long-term procurement plans for negotiating with material and logistics suppliers.

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