Customer Order Fulfillment
Customer order fulfillment involves the allocation, configuration, pricing, capture, promising, tracking, and delivery of vehicles to dealers and customers. These processes work in conjunction with continuous supply management processes to provide accurate promises that can be reliably met by the OEM supply chain.
i2 has designed solutions for:
Allocation Management and Optimization "delivers" vehicles to certain markets and the vehicles are then allocated to the dealer level through sales organization strategies and rules. The dealer and customer ordering process is then executed within the envelope of these allocations.
Order Promising (ATP, LTO, CTO, BTO) is the process of taking a dealer or customer request for a vehicle configuration and providing an accurate delivery date for that request. Order promising may also provide alternatives and tradeoffs for the dealer or customer to consider. These tradeoffs may include delivery date, product option content, and price. The promise date is derived by directly scheduling the vehicle against inventory (locate-to-order), the sequence and master schedule (configure-to-order), and the production plan (build-to-order), within the OEM allocation policies.
Order Configuration and Pricing is the process of creating a valid vehicle configuration and pricing it out prior to promising and order capture. This process includes taking the dealer and/or customer through an easy way to configure and price their specific vehicle while keeping within sales and marketing configuration rules.
Order Management is the process of capturing configured orders and managing order status through delivery. This includes providing a single face to the customer and providing visibility of the order status throughout its life cycle across multiple enterprises.
Outbound Transportation Optimization is the process of managing and optimizing the outbound shipment of vehicles from assembly plants through consolidation hubs to dealers, customers, and ports of export.
Material Flow Management
Material flow management for automotive OEMs encompasses the processes of planning, optimizing the inbound supply network, and linking to the design process, as well as managing supplier capacities and schedules. The process also includes the generation of material replenishment schedules for assembly and component facilities, as well as the execution of replenishments, including transportation and logistics.
i2 has designed solutions for:
Inbound Supply Network Optimization is designed to optimize the inbound supply chains—including internal and external capacities; inventory locations and quantities; logistics; containers; and part plans. This solution can consider different scenarios, including global versus local sourcing, to arrive at the least-landed cost approach for part supply.
Assembly and Component Replenishment Scheduling can enable the development of part replenishment schedules, while considering banking requirements, transportation routes, supplier allocations, and different replenishment strategies, including delivery to forecast (DELFOR), delivery to JIT (DELJIT), and delivery to push (PUS).
Supplier Schedule and Capacity Management is designed to validate, communicate, and collaborate on material requirements to satisfy assembly and component operations. Supplier schedule and capacity management can occur during the planning stages to ensure that plans are validated before beginning scheduling and execution.
Lean Supply Management is designed to efficiently manage the execution of inbound material replenishments. This solution can provide workflows to manage different replenishment strategies such as customer-scheduled shipment (CSS), pull-based replenishment (PBR), sequenced parts supply (SPS), and supplier-managed inventory (SMI). Further, lean supply management can provide the ability to process ASNs, receipts, and invoices, as well as manage events, and collaborate on exceptions.
Inbound Transportation Optimization is designed to create optimal inbound material shipments and loads to assembly and component facilities. Optimal plans are created considering supply chain constraints.
Transportation Management and Supply Chain Visibility
Transportation management includes all of the workflows required to plan, optimize, and execute the automotive transport process.
Transportation Bid Collaboration enables intelligent procurement of transportation services.
Transportation Planning enables transport planners to plan and monitor freight across multiple modes, borders, and enterprises. It is designed to optimally plan the best way to ship high volumes of goods from one point to another, considering real-world constraints, sophisticated business rules, and advanced transportation strategies.
Transportation Execution is designed to support the activities necessary to execute, manage, and monitor the entire transportation execution life cycle. The solution builds loads that honor operational and physical constraints, leveraging sophisticated solving techniques to create optimized shipment plans.
Sourcing Execution
To ensure that the strategy around specific commodities for long-term sourcing are executed optimally, an efficient process to manage operations steps must exist. The process must manage such items as:
- Bidding of items with suppliers
- Analyzing bids and awarding a contract based on constraints
- Executing the purchases as required by production operations in a timely manner
i2 has designed solutions for:
Supplier Negotiations and Bid Analysis for automotive companies can require more iterative negotiation types, such as request for information (RFI), request for proposal (RFP), and request for quotation (RFQ). The process also can require the ability to source entire multi-line-item BOMs simultaneously. In addition, integrating with change management and PDM systems is important as the engineers work closely with suppliers. Effective management of product costs requires the buyer to understand total cost and supply risk across multiple tiers of the supply chain when analyzing and awarding bids. Constraint-based bid and allocation optimization can enable automotive manufacturers to quickly analyze bids and perform multi-supplier allocation. i2’s solution can take into account total landed cost and specific business rules, such as minority requirements and supplier performance in deciding the allocation.
Procurement Execution is the final process of managing an order life cycle with the supply base. In many cases this may be a blanket purchase order. In addition there is the need to have a single face to the supplier around multiple capabilities such as forecasts, firm orders, ASNs, order changes, and receipts, as well as alerts and exceptions.
Consolidated Procurement is designed to help manage centralized procurement across multiple divisions or outsourced business units. It provides a single system of reference with links to back end systems, allowing local transaction processing. This solution provides global visibility and tracking of all purchasing activity.
Service Parts Management
The Service Parts Management solution includes service budget optimization, parts forecasting and replenishment, as well as order promising and management. i2’s solution has been recognized with an Automotive News PACE award for its contribution to delivering value to automotive OEM service parts organizations.
i2 has designed solutions for:
Service Budget/Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization is designed to provide the optimal inventory deployment strategy within a multi-echelon inventory network to maximize customer service while simultaneously considering supply chain and financial (budget) constraints. This includes demand and part segmentation to determine optimal stocking levels and locations.
Forecasting and Replenishment Planning incorporates the processes of forecasting service part demand across the multi-echelon inventory network. It also involves developing replenishment plans to ensure time-phase delivery of parts to maintain inventory levels to attain highest-possible service levels. Forecasting and replenishment for the service parts environment requires specialized forecasting techniques and replenishment capabilities that are scalable to millions of part-location combinations.
Order Promising and Execution encompasses the processes of capturing service parts replenishment orders and promising them using the most efficient stocking location and delivery techniques.
Service Parts Catalog Management can provide a technical infrastructure along to create, manage, and maintain the catalog.
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