Building a Resilient & Elastic Supply Chain

With an environment of extreme demand and supply volatility, now is the time to recalibrate and empower your supply chain and financial planning teams with tools to make decisions to overcome disruptions.

As supply chains continue to recover from the disruption created by COVID-19 are they prepared for the next wave of disruption? Recalibrating and optimizing your supply chain planning during and post COVID-19 will be critical for business success. Using historical data as a predictor for future supply chain plans will have limitations. Does your team have the tools required to model different scenarios that will allow them to visualize impact across the company? Do they need to run multiple data extracts and create reports before they are able to provide results of a scenario? Now multiply this by a minimum of 10x and how many hours of effort will be required?  Can you move from a monthly planning mode to a near real–time mode of planning to address a specific disruption while understanding the direct impact to the cash flow of the company?   

Solution 

Inspirage’s Supply Chain Risk Control Tower solution addresses this very specific topic by institutionalizing the risk scenario planning and mitigation by leveraging valuable insights from numerous disparate systems and processes that encompass areas such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM).  

Oracle SCM cloud allows the supply chain planner to model a demand increase or decrease scenario in a product category or region. Alternately the planner can also model the scenario of a loss of a key supplier due to geographic disruptions and compare alternate supplier options. Oracle EPM cloud allows the finance manager to model labor cost, operational expense planning, workforce planning, financial statement, reporting budgeting and re-forecasting. Alternately the finance manager could also model cash impact when changing collection time, inventory holding time & payables time.   

 Inspirage’s Supply Chain Risk Control Tower is a 3rd generation iteration of Enterprise Control Tower built on Oracle Cloud Analytics platform and available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace. It allows the user to visualize the multiple integrated business planning and execution (IBPX) scenarios with their corresponding impact to the cash forecast, income statement and balance sheet. The control tower allows you to view the scenarios at multiple levels of aggregation and drill into a specific problem area.  In addition, you also gain visibility across the supply chain and measure product/supplier risk such as exposure to single sourced items, exposure to volatile regions by leveraging a supplier risk scorecard. The control tower also provides you the capability to traverse the bill of material visually to identify risk. This empowers the user to simulate a potential future disruption in multiple different dimensions and evaluate impact. This allows you to build a playbook that will plan your resources effectively and prepare your suppliers to manage the disruption. 

Case Study 

At an industrial manufacturing client there was a large consolidation effort to transition from disparate business applications to Oracle SaaS applications. Peripheral applications for certain business operations, like Financials or Warehouse management, were outside, and could not be connected to provide integrated view of the end-to-end supply chain operations which is very critical for process and decision optimization. Oracle Analytics Cloud was deployed with an Inspirage built control tower to connect the functional silos such as SCM, Planning & ERP modules to provide information visibility and deeper insights. We found the following benefits. 

• Better visibility into business operations and faster insights 
• Analyze large volumes of data along with self-service analytics 
• Management & Executive Dashboards 

Conclusion 

During and post COVID-19, how you recalibrate and optimize your supply chain and financial planning will be critical for business success to prepare for the next wave of disruption. New analysis and models will be required to compute future supply chain plans, as well as model multiple scenarios. Extracting data, analyzing and modeling will need to be done near real-time to be able to respond effectively. Develop a phased approach to your Control Tower journey to suit your needs, but the foundation can be established in 60 days or less. Visit the Oracle Cloud Marketplace to learn more.