Full Supply/Demand Visibility with the OpsVeda End-to-End Monitor Solution

Having departments dedicated to specific aspects of your business such as logistics, inventory, manufacturing etc. is obviously a common strategy but it is also important to have a full picture, a comprehensive view, of the complete process flow of materials making their way through your business systems. It is often very important to gain access to the full path and all roadblocks associated with a sales order, than to simply optimize inventory or logistics in a silo.

Increased product variety, shorter life-cycles, compliance considerations, customer specific requirements and internal process changes are all factors that businesses must work around in order to best maintain relevancy in today’s competitive marketplace.

Challenges

High level planners and CEO/COOs alike are faced with many different challenges in today’s complicated manufacturing and sales networks. Some of the key challenges that an enterprise may face on a daily basis include:

Non-compliance penalties/charges
Frequent process and procedure changes
IT dependency
Lack of forecast based planning
Poor forecasts, poor collaboration
Demand/ supply mismatch
Shortages and overages
Increasing operating expenses
Margin leakage

Questions that often need urgent answers could be: To which date should I request the customer to push out the delivery? Should I expedite, and if so, which purchase order should be expedited?

Solution

The OpsVeda End-to-End Monitor runs on the OpsVeda platform, an AI and automation enabled real-time process focused platform that allows wide ranging flexibility to the enterprise to optimize decisions pertaining to some of the most critical end to end needs it might encounter.

OpsVeda’s End-to-End Monitor helps CEOs, COOs, planners and sales to address manufacturing and distribution exceptions in a highly proactive, efficient and scalable manner. The solution provides visibility across process steps, leading to reduced lead times, increased savings and improved customer satisfaction. A real-time view of backlogs, unconfirmed orders and the ability to draw on filtered and prioritized task lists provide quick relief.

The End-to-End Monitor from OpsVeda enables a business team to start with a complete view of the supply chain and drill-down to the details needed to address problems. The monitor covers every plant, warehouse, supplier, customer, other locations of interest and any execution issues (including disruptions such as natural disasters). When using these solutions one can review the supply/demand situation at each Inventory Planning Point (IPP), through the lens of inbound shipments, outbound shipments, process/exceptions insights and even capture decisions or corrective actions as needed.

The most impactful aspects of this solution are:

Real-time View of Unconfirmed Orders & Backlogs.

Events from various internal & external back-end systems like ERP & CRM are streamed to OpsVeda-Order Fulfillment and processed in real-time to highlight cases of current & potential backlogs. Further the system provides a real-time view of orders that have been received but not confirmed. This assists the management to focus on the orders/customers who need attention right now. OpsVeda — Order Fulfillment also comes with a Time Travel feature that will allow the manager to track progress in confirming orders and resolving backlogs. The system allows comparison of operational status at different time instances at any level of organizational granularity.

Filtered & Prioritized Task List

Your sales operations team is dealing with tens of thousands of orders every day. Today they are probably reacting to customer feedback and prioritizing based on the customer who is shouting the loudest. With OpsVeda — Order Fulfillment, your team will know about an exception well before it disrupts the sales process. It will even prioritize the potential exceptions based on time-lines, order value, customer satisfaction scores etc. Further, it will also allow the user to view the exceptions in graphical form, slice & dice the exceptions and drill-down to the sales document that needs to be worked on.

In-Context Collaboration

Identifying an exception is only the first step. Typically the resolution process involves collaboration between the sales operations team and various stake-holders — production, finance, logistics provider, customer etc. OpsVeda – Order Fulfillment comes with features, that will enable users to collaborate through unstructured email communication and still maintain the context of the structured data – no more copy & paste for maintaining context. The application will also allow the user to park and review exceptions, tag line items for alerts against unexpected exceptions, thus helping them to organize their tasks and at the same time allow for wait times that are normally part of the exception resolution process.

Impact Analysis through Search

A disruption at any stage in the order to cash chain could have an impact on customer commitments. The system comes with a search feature where the user can assess the impact of an event. For example, if a shipment is stuck at customs, the logical step would be to check the orders that would be impacted and to inform the customer in advance; the entire set of tasks can be initiated by entering the material code.

Machine Learned & Business Authored Rules

The sales operations team could be making hundreds of decisions every day. OpsVeda’s machine learning capabilities enables the system to correlate the business situations and decisions for future prescription, thereby boosting productivity. Business processes are dynamic and new exception types could become a requirement any time. OpsVeda provides a user-friendly interface where business users can define rules and exceptions – no more dependence on IT for rule changes.

Some other key functions that the OpsVeda solution offers that are more effective than alternative software solutions due to its machine learning capabilities include:

Benefits

Enterprises have reported several high level benefits associated with the use of the OpsVeda End to End Monitoring solution. Questions such as: “What are the exceptions preventing timely inbound to the plant?” “Which sales order are dependent on the stock at this DC?” are now easily answered. Numerous fundamental benefits that are of particular interest to CEOs and COOs also become apparent as soon at the OpsVeda solution starts running your enterprise:

Reduction of Working Capital

A complete view of the demand, supply and inventory situation at each location enables efficient allocation of stocks resulting in better availability despite lower overall inventory levels.

Service Level Improvements

The solution acts as a control tower for your supply chain, keeping you abreast of developments at your locations, assets in transit and partner premises. The real-time visibility enables you to make adjustments on the fly so that customer SLAs are adhered to.

Productivity Improvements

Your team will be able to move quickly using either an overview of the situation or by drilling all the way down to the transactions that needs their attention. They can even resolve exceptions in source systems without ever leaving the OpsVeda platform.

Better Collaboration

The significantly improved visibility provides much needed clarity when your team collaborates with internal and external stakeholders.

All of this allows for the capability to efficiently work within the OpsVeda platform and avoid bouncing from one transactional system to another just to gain insight on one particular topic. Optimized margins and total customer satisfaction will become reasonable goals when the OpsVeda End-to-End Monitor is employed to gain a live and integrated view of supply, demand, inventory and in-transit materials for optimal execution of sales.

Having OpsVeda’s solutions can be instrumental in improving the efficiency of a company’s supply chain. The ability to satisfy customer demands more effectively through using this platform can give way to lower operating costs and greater sales capacity for new customers.