ThroughPut Inc., the Industrial AI Supply Chain pioneer, today announced several platform updates to its new high-impact Demand Sensing software module. These new capabilities will help Demand Planners, S&OP Professionals and Supply Chain Managers to rapidly free up existing manufacturing capacity, gain additional throughput potential, create concrete productivity gains and boost financial impact amidst ever-growing supply and demand uncertainty.
The unprecedented challenges laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed companies to shift from yesterday's status-quo point legacy solutions to a new generation of data-driven systemic solutions and revamp their supply chain dynamics to better prepare for the future and cement their competitive marketplace advantages. According to Gartner, more than 70% of supply chains globally have been significantly impacted due to COVID-19. Typical challenges with producing reliable forecasts include siloed and manual analysis across hundreds of thousands of SKUs to uncover and optimize the product-mix performance for near-term, seasonal, cyclical and evolving trends.
The world-renowned Theory of Constraints Expert and Throughput Economics Author, Eli Schrangenheim, explained, "The shocks from the COVID-19 pandemic have been multifold - from ups and downs in the demand to choking supply chain capacity to creating extended lags across the supply cycle. ThroughPut's Demand Sensing solution, coupled with deep understanding of the operational flow, can quickly enable companies to build resilience against future demand and supply chain shocks in the post-covid world."
As companies slowly crawl-back to the "new normal", global leaders have started working towards repurposing their operations to respond with greater agility to demand uncertainty, unforeseen market changes, and new industry trends. The demand planners and S&OP teams need to create a more accurate picture of their true demand to evaluate lost sales opportunities and uncover new executable insights to re-capture and grow their markets going forward.
"As the pandemic enters into its second year, companies are working towards predicting lead times and stocking levels more accurately. Supply chain leaders can leverage AI on their historical and current data to re-optimize existing capacity, while effectively prioritizing demand fulfillment using more frequently-generated, recent and real-time data," explained Ali Raza, CEO of ThroughPut Inc. "Without halting any on-going digital implementations or throwing out existing systems, ThroughPut provides a much-needed solution to rebalance the entire end-to-end supply chain flow on a single platform that incorporates existing siloed data stores, systems and warehouses. The ThroughPut Demand Sensing Module provides the "true North" for supply chains to fulfill."
ThroughPut Demand Sensing
The ThroughPut Demand Sensing Module empowers demand planners with critical Business Intelligence for holistic and accurate Demand Planning by minimizing silos and bottlenecks between demand and supply teams. ThroughPut's AI automatically ties existing data together that captures Demand, Capacity, and Supply behaviors, thus automating Inventory Turnover and Free-Cash-Flow improvements. Operational Improvements are now noticeably visible within days with ThroughPut's Supply Chain AI and effectively surfaced via autopilot to the right decision-making teams.
Key Updates in ThroughPut's Supply Chain AI Demand Sensing Module include:
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Demand Planners can now quickly explore hidden demand patterns and trends to create Responsive and Agile Supply Chains to meet Near-Term Demand. Using ThroughPut's proprietary AI, demand planners can:
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Quickly identify, analyze and understand disruptions in the supply chain that resulted in significant lost sales vs. areas where the impact of poor performance had minimal losses
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Get prioritized Recommendations based on time and effort for the most significant Return On Investment
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Receive timely warning signals on the parts of the supply chain ecosystem that require attention and can potentially be impacted by sudden shifts in behavior caused by supply, demand, operations, or delivery performance.
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AI-powered Product-Mix Optimization provides ABC | XYZ segmentation of sellable products along with a month-on-month product mix tracking and sales/contribution margins to identify products at risk. These critical recommendations arm demand planners to create a truly demand-centric inventory strategy, thus preventing over- and under-stocking of the high-performing products vs. the low-performing laggards.
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SKU health from the demand stability standpoint provides a detailed overview of the sellable products by SKU / POS location, highlights the top-performing and underperforming SKUs, and focuses on the main performance metrics, including On-Time and In-Full (OTIF) and On-Shelf-Availability (OSA) per segment. This enables companies to prioritize improvement efforts based on the actual impact on Sales Throughput.
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Better collaboration drives higher forecast accuracy and enables businesses to build an integrated, demand-driven, systemic Supply Chain Plan. This helps strengthen the cross-functional alignment and partnership between various stakeholders for teams like Marketing, Finance, Planning, and Sales to enable more effective Demand Planning.
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Identify Working Capital Reduction Opportunities with 360-degree views of Demand Plans on material cost and sales price changes to make informed product-mix decisions.