International Symposium in Honour of Ravi Ravindran

Marutiseva Nagar, India, March 31, 2015 (Newswire.com) - The symposium was organised by his students, spread across the globe, to honour him on his 70th birth year.

ITC Infotech presented 3 papers at the event.

1. Constraint based supply chain design

An abstract:

Optimizing the efficiency of every node in a supply chain is important, however, most companies end up doing this in pieces that work in silos. This often results in a lag towards meeting expected objectives. Typically, a supply chain is bound by one or only a few constraints. Key is to identify and elevate those specific constraints and tune the entire supply chain to optimize them. This concept is called constraint based planning and is applicable to dispersed or multi-node supply chains. The planning goes through the stages of constraint identification, analysis of efficiency/throughput losses on the constraint, planning to maximise the utilization of constraint, protecting the constraint through buffers, planning all the other supply chain nodes around the constraint plan.

2. Planning in a high mix variable demand environment

An abstract:

Proliferation of SKUs, increasing competition and trend for customized products leading to overall demand volatility has asserted heavy pressure on the planning process to serve the market while managing operating efficiencies. The traditional planning process around a finite number of products with stable volumes had top-down demand forecasting, sequential production planning to achieve highest efficiency, and replenishment based inventory management.

This kind of supply chain is not suited for the ever-changing modern environment, where forecasts can be too inaccurate, huge variety in products mix in each planning cycle preventing a predefined sequence and generic inventory planning.

Now is the need for a lean and agile approach to planning, where lean strives for a predefined plan and agile responds to the actual business need. The decoupling point between the lean and agile level is at the boundary of predictability and unpredictability in the supply chain.

3. Supply Chain Design & Optimization – Need to partner it with existing planning system

An abstract:

Current market dynamics require businesses to service market demands but at optimized cost. As contradictory the both objectives stand, it is a clear challenge to define an optimal operation zone that balances the two. There are several factors to both these objectives, internal and external, and any change in these factors is bound to shift the optimal operation zone. Furthermore, the problem gets more complex considering future aspirations of the organization.

An agile, cost efficient supply chain can forecast most of the changing dynamics for a considerable time span. However, these forecasts have their own limitations and need to be revisited regularly, subsequently demanding a decision support system which can regularly make step wise shifts towards optimal zone of operation. This implies related supply chain operating policies to be defined in time based ‘firm’ supply chain design framework. The problem statements here are more frequently changing and need to be addressed in a shorter buckets and frequency.

There are many instances of the gap between cost and service level due to the lack of a planning system which can sustain the long term designs and operating policy answers. The solution lies in having a decision support systems like “Network Design & Optimization” introduced and partnered with existing planning systems at a granular level (granularity in time, product and geos basis).

ITC Infotech presents views on ways to address some of the problems stated above, sharing experiences and examples, and also detail out how solutions like “Network Design & optimization” can help organization deliver desired values.

We were also part of the panel on Analytics.