Understanding Concurrent Planning
In today's globalized world, supply chains face unprecedented complexity and volatility due to factors like trade tensions, natural disasters, and global health crises. To address these challenges, companies are turning to concurrent planning as a holistic approach that integrates the entire planning network, enabling real-time adjustments across all supply chain functions. Concurrent planning unifies plans across all time horizons and granularities, providing planners with a comprehensive view of past, present, and future impacts instantly.
Drawbacks of Cascaded Supply Chain Planning
Cascaded supply chain planning, characterized by siloed functional excellence, often leads to misalignment, operational blindness, and inefficiencies across the supply chain. By optimizing individual functions without considering their impact on the entire chain, organizations face collaboration challenges, lost opportunities, and compromised business objectives. The slow, manual, and error-prone nature of cascaded planning limits planners' ability to respond swiftly to unexpected changes.
Concurrent Planning Methodology
Concurrent planning is not just a technique but is empowered by advanced supply chain planning and execution technology. By leveraging cloud services, in-memory databases, and efficient versioning engines, concurrent planning enables fast, connected, end-to-end synchronization of data, processes, and people. This integrated approach supports capabilities like what-if scenarios, demand sensing, predictive analytics, and more, ensuring alignment from strategic to tactical levels.
Key Benefits of Concurrent Planning
Concurrent supply chain planning offers significant advantages for companies managing intricate global supply chains. By improving agility, planning proactively, eliminating functional silos, and shortening planning cycles, concurrent planning enhances overall operational efficiency, responsiveness, and decision-making. Planners can quickly adapt to changes, anticipate disruptions, collaborate more effectively, and create actionable plans in minutes, leading to reduced risks, waste, and latency.