Demo Video Supply Chain Resilience

With Anaplan for Supply Chain, achieve real-time insight and ensure accurate supply forecasts to consistently and efficiently meet demand.

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Transcript

Welcome to another Bedford Consulting spotlight video. This time, we’re going to take a look at supply chain resilience and how Anaplan and Bedford can help your organisation thrive in times of uncertainty or change. Whether it be fuel shortages, lorry driver shortages, extreme weather events, shipping disruption, etc., you could be forgiven for thinking that supply chain disruption is increasing, maybe both in frequency and severity. Of course, in business, there is always a risk in the supply chain. Some of this can be anticipated to an extent, but much of it is also unanticipated. The important thing for businesses is how you respond and adapt to these events. That means always allowing for anticipated risk, e.g., through looking at historic data and utilising statistical forecasting, but also being ready to act on unexpected events. So, the supply chain can be both a source of resilience and a source of vulnerability. If you have a solution that can quickly help you make sense of the data coming from internal and, importantly, external sources, a solution that also allows you to be flexible in your approach to planning processes and have inbuilt capability to model the alternatives at those times when it is necessary to take action, then you are closer to turning data into actionable insights that will help the organisation thrive. So, the impact of supply chain events largely depends on how you can monitor, plan, and react.

Anaplan is the connected planning platform. What this means is it can connect the data, it can connect the people, and it can connect the processes. So, pulling data from numerous sources with automated uploads from both cloud and on-premise sources, connecting the people, multiple people in the organisation will need to be involved, we need to collaborate in the planning processes, and also connecting the processes themselves. If you think about it, the output from the demand plan is an input to supply planning, is an input to inventory planning and workforce planning, for example. Of course, there are many other connections to consider. I’m now logged in to Anaplan. When an apartment lives in the cloud, when I log in, I have security to allow me to only do what I’ve been set up to do as a user. Here, we’ve got full access to everything for the purposes of the demonstration.

In this demonstration, we’re looking at supply chain. We’re looking at the ability to supply fresh produce from various source countries to various destination markets. We’re looking at the prices of that produce and how it fluctuates across those markets. And importantly as well, we’re covering off the concepts of what if I need to adjust. What if the products I’m getting, the size of those products fluctuates? That’s going to have an impact on how much I can sell them for. In addition, if the quality of those products also fluctuates, again, that’s going to impact the price that I can achieve in the market. Ultimately, we want to generate a gross margin in this example but also have the capability to touch on the what-if scenarios. What happens if I change certain metrics?

Now, the overall bigger picture as well flows into the capability to look at statistical forecasting. Now, of course, if we’re looking at supply chain disruptions that are unanticipated, the usefulness of statistical forecasting might not necessarily be relevant, as we found out in recent times. Importantly as well, I’m thinking about external data. For a produce grower, external data is going to be absolutely vital in terms of weather forecasts, weather trends, to understand what the impact in the past of poor weather might be on the organisation if, in our modelling, we need to take a completely different direction. We also want to be able to link through to strategy planning where we’ve got a different, more senior group of people in the organisation thinking about the top-down strategy and how that flows into the operational side of things more along the lines of what we’re seeing here.

But within our plan, you’ve got that capability to link these processes together, link, remember, link the people and link the data. Now, I’m going to jump in and look at my cases forecasts, cases of produce. We can see here, now, we’re focusing on a particular country, a particular source country where that produce is coming from. We’re looking at bananas. We’re going to sell those bananas into region five. We’re focusing on FY2, and we’re looking at our forecast scenario. So within a single screen, Anaplan has the capability to support a whole host of users across multiple dimensions. We build these screens once; we can roll them out to a large audience who can collaborate.

As part of the forecast, we can see here the user for the country one bananas in region five looking at that forecast. They’ve overridden some of the case numbers; they’ve updated that forecast, and they’ve overridden it with some local adjustments. However, when we come to forecast version two, we can see that actually, a global adjustment from a more senior member of the team has been overlaid on top of that. The global adjustment wins, and now we can see our final adjusted cases. So, it’s really down to how you want to set up a process, what flexibility you want to build into that process. Once we’re happy with that, we can choose what version we’re going to submit. In this case, I’m going to use the workflow within our plan to submit my version forecast two for approval.

Even in the business, the nature of Anaplan is such that we can adopt a process of always-on forecasting. It can be a continuous process, always updating with live information around the house, the when, the what, of consumer demand. It no longer has to be a monthly process; it can be a weekly, it can be a daily process. It’s entirely down to you. And it has to be that way when you think about the unanticipated nature of changes in the market. We need that concept of always on available to us within our plan.

And as we continue to think about supply chain disruption, I want to also think about pricing and what the impact of product size and product quality might have on that. So, I’m going to jump into my adjustments around size and quality of produce. We’re again looking at country one, region five, and this time, we’re looking at the what-if forecast, the alternative scenario, the scenario that I’ll have to put in place quickly because I see some potential disruptions to supply. In this case, we’re looking at bananas. We’ve got an average price of seven going through the months, coming up slightly as we get into March. However, what I’ve done is I think, actually, size-wise, I’m expecting from what I’ve heard from my supply chain that these are going to be below standard. So, I’ve placed a global adjustment saying that bananas in these months will be lower than expected in terms of size and lower than expected in terms of quality. That’s automatically factoring in a -5% price and a -3% on quality. That means I can sell these items for a lower price. It might also, of course, impact how many of them I can sell. We can see here, down at the bottom in this screen, we’re actually holding those drivers which will decide what are the factors that will be applied. So, in region one, for below standard in terms of size, there’s going to be a -5% impact on prices. So, we can factor in multiple supply chain issues in one model.

So, we’ve shown how we can adjust our plans based on supply chain disruptions and changes, but we also might want to consider how we can extend that out directly to the suppliers themselves in terms of pulling in external data. It might be something as simple as weather data, but it also might be thinking about allowing suppliers to collect directly to a secure area in our plan and provide some information directly to us to avoid that sort of re-keying. We can get them to put that data directly into our models, and we can see the impact of that directly.

Now, in these examples, our output is our forecasting, our gross margin. So, bringing everything together at the top level and giving us a feel for what does it look like, what does our forecast version look like in terms of gross margin, what does our forecast version two look like in terms of gross margin? Okay, that can be at the very top level. It could be me going down to any level in between to understand the exact part of the business that I’m interested in, what changes, what are the changes in the plan done to our ultimate gross margin and gross margin percent in this situation. Now, that’s all very well having forecast and forecast version two there, but really, I want to be able to compare those side by side. But I also might want to go ahead and put in an even higher level of adjustment, very top-level senior management. I’m just thinking about well, in my forecast version two, irrespective of which country I’m in, which product category I’m looking at, which sales region I’m looking at, what would happen if my cost of sales went up by 15% across all the months, going up to June and having that immediately flow through. What happens if my price is if I cut, I can only get -10% less for my prices? What impact will that have, a -10% decrease on prices in my model as well? So, very high-level top changes, not without needing to go right down to that lower level of detail. And I want, of course, I want to compare those scenarios side by side, and with Anaplan, that’s a very easy thing to do. Here, we can now see at a high level, I’m looking at my forecast versus my forecast two gross margin, and we can see the immediate impact of those changes that we’ve instigated into the plan.

So, we’ve shown you how, as an organisation, you can react nimbly using a solution such as Anaplan, reallocating resources, and always thinking about the concept of continuous planning, always-on planning, whereby you’re not just planning once a week, once a month, you can plan in real time if you need to, both responding to changes in the supply chain, disruptions in the supply chain, but also changes in consumer demand, what people want, when people want it, how much they’re prepared to pay for it. We look forward to continuing discussion further if you want to investigate more around the value of Anaplan within your organisation. But for the moment, then, thank you very much for joining us. [Music]