Manufacturers are experiencing continued inflationary pressures threatening customer service and profit margins with record-breaking price increases and lack of material availability. To add fuel to the fire, they are also starting to worry about preparing for a potential recession.
Lisa Anderson, a supply-chain management expert and the president of LMA Consulting Group, says if you’ve got the cash on hand now,"it’s not a bad idea to start your holiday shopping early this year."
Since the pandemic, it has been a constant battle to ensure material availability, let alone to proactively manage cost and service. Even the most proactive and successful clients have experienced brief shortages of key materials and extended lead-times. The rest have been plagued with these issues.
Improving OTIF and Reducing Cost and Inventory Every client wants to support growth goals while improving service levels (OTIF, on-time-in-full), operational efficiencies and inventory turns. These are timeless objectives for every planner. During the pandemic, the priorities shifted to service levels because clients struggled to keep up with dramatic [...]
Lisa Anderson was interviewed by Lucie Newcomb for the podcast series “Staying Global While Staying Home”. They addressed the topic of the state of the global supply chain and strategies to successfully navigate with Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP / SIOP) with an emphasis on getting a handle on demand volatility. [...]
According to FactSet Insight, revenue growth is predicted at 7.5% for 2022 which is substantial when considering it is following record-breaking growth in 2021. Clients and colleagues are seeing record increases in sales revenues and pricing.
Sales Growth: Can Operations & Supply Chain Keep Up? Almost every client has the opportunity to grow substantially. The question is whether their operations and supply chain can keep up. Unfortunately, across the board, planners are wringing their hands to expedite orders, prioritize customers, schedule additional production, understand the [...]
Every production planner has the challenging job of managing a complex set of conflicting priorities - meeting customer requested ship dates and new product trials, supporting manufacturing and logistics performance objectives, and addressing finance's objectives as it relates to inventory levels and cash flow.
Lisa Anderson and the team at LMA Consulting working with Nellson to upgrade the planning, purchasing/ MRP, supply chain and S&OP/ SIOP processes. The result was improved service levels with on time in full (OTIF) from the low 90's to the high 90's; reduced inventory levels; reduced obsolete inventory, improved billbacks on expired material (from around 0% to nearly 100%); and gained more value from the ERP system.
Predicting the Unpredictable Every client believes their demand cannot be predicted. After all, customers don't know what is going on in their end-to-end supply chain with the global supply chain chaos. Sales teams are optimistic and either forecast too much, hoping Operations will produce and store "just in case" [...]
