Most supply chain professionals and planners think of finished goods when they hear attributes. But attributes are present in every part of the supply chain from suppliers to raw materials, to machinery, products and distribution centers.
Many companies say that they want to Optimize Inventory, but they often have different things in mind when they say it.
Why do we need Attribute Based Planning? Attributes are properties specific to an object. In a supply chain, like anything else, everything that you deal with has attributes.
What sets planning and execution apart is really the horizon and timing between the time a decision is made and when it is realized. In general, we plan for responsiveness and execute for reliability.
According to a Gartner survey, “in two to five years a quarter of companies plan to be doing some autonomous planning. Over the same period, 97% of companies plan to have some form of automation in their supply chain decision making.”
Intelligence is a relative concept and hard to define. When it comes to number crunching and speed of calculations, machines do much better than humans. By the fact that we attribute the mathematical ability to intelligence, machines must be very intelligent!
Unified Data Model is more than a so called “single data model.” One single model in memory unlike unified data model cannot expand and contract to lower levels of detail and higher levels of planning.
Dalsa has been using Adexa planning applications for many years to overcome their business challenges such as on-hand inventory reduction, meeting customer requested date and capacity allocation for the demand load and engineering forecasts.
With stochastic planning and ability to learn patterns of behavior we are at a point to know the exact availability of resources, tools, customer and supplier behavior as they change in different seasons, with events or other social and environmental factors.
Covid-19 has been a good lesson for most companies to bring to surface the vulnerability of their supply chains. However, we have many other events including recent tariffs and trade wars, economic downturn of 2008, and tsunami in Japan.
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