Demand management in today's "want it now" environment is supremely challenging. Supply chains are more complex and volatile, lead times are more variable, costs are fluctuating, and many operating systems are incapable of presenting and dynamically analyzing all this information in a simple and intuitive structure.
If your customers want your product faster than you can procure the material necessary and/or produce the item, then you have the headaches associated with carrying inventory and managing finite capacity. For many organizations, large and small, attempting to manage all these competing requirements without adding more people and significant cost is nearly impossible.
- What if you were able to manage these dynamics in a manner that increased your customer service and reduced your inventory costs?
- What if you not only had software built on solid APICS fundamentals but incorporated the Forecast Pro family of forecasting algorithms, one of the top performers in the much cited Makridakis M3 forecasting competition?
- What if you had an expert resource at your disposal that became a part of your supply chain planning team?
- What if you were able to gain all this at a cost that is significantly less than hiring a full time Demand Management professional and pays for itself by reducing inventory costs and increasing sales?
DemandCaster® is designed to address your planning challenges in a cost effective and minimally intrusive manner. It is an outsourced response management service that couples web based analytics with a repeatable process of expert analysis and collaboration to improve inventory turns and capacity utilization for better service and cash flow.
DemandCaster® does not replace your current ERP engine. It turbo charges it! DemandCaster® integrates with your existing ERP system and/or customer planning systems to analyze and forecast demand for the products that are sold to end users. It dynamically performs a 360 degree analysis of every SKU for the characteristics that drive inventory: volatility of customer demand and reliability of inventory replenishment.
DemandCaster® accommodates both make to order and make to stock items and dynamically calculates safety stock and reorder points for all items and provides multiple levels of aggregation. Every aggregation or SKU provides a interactive graphical interface which visualizes historical demand, future demand, and provides a breakdown of each items customers and volumes by period all on one screen. Click on a point on the graph takes you to the period in history where the demand was created to see which customer bought the item, how much they bought, and when they bought. At your choosing, you can open a dialog box where you can input adjustments to history or forecast for the selected period. You can also tag the issue and send it to key personnel for input. Click on a button in the tool bar and you will see multiple statistics related to the demand and forecast of the product. In addition there are numerous options to establish inventory and planning policies by any grouping or item scenario desired. This includes service levels, order frequency, and lead time basis to name a few. Make a few changes and immediately see the effect of the policy change. If the item is part of a BOM, you can see the effect on all related items. If you are happy with the changes, you can save them for future use. You also have the power to analyze vendor delivery performance and use actual delivery performance as the basis to make inventory planning decisions.
Because it is a standalone system all data and adjustments made to that data are saved separately. It also remembers prior model selections, history adjustments, events and prior forecasts (for performance evaluation). Collaborative changes are easily synchronized back to the main model and the performance monitoring supports comparison of various scenarios with actual.
The system provides full replenishment or master production plans that can be driven back to your ERP system for execution. In addition, DemandCaster® has the capability to balance replenishment and production plans against a current and future capacity model to identify capacity shortfalls or availability for maximum utilization of resources.
Finally and most importantly, each analysis is reviewed in detail by an expert demand management analyst that is assigned to your company for the stated purpose of optimizing inventory and capacity performance to increase cash flow and profit. Through a proprietary process of on-line collaboration and analysis we work with your employees to drive a repeatable and continuously improving process that works to establish the right amount of inventory and resources at the right time - not too much, not too little.
DemandCaster is a proprietary software with a service from Cadent Resources, Inc.. It is based on 20 years of experience working with manufacturing and distribution companies like yours to improve operational performance and an overriding belief that software alone is rarely the solution to operational problems. The best results are those that engage knowledgeable people in a process of continuous learning and collaboration to solve problems. Good software simply serves as the enabler to facilitate positive results as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
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