Customer Order Fulfillment
Customer order fulfillment involves the allocation, configuration, pricing, capture, promising, tracking, and delivery of vehicles to dealers and customers. These processes can be incorporated into continuous supply management to provide accurate promises that can be reliably met by the industrial manufacturer supply chain.
i2 has designed solutions for:
Allocation and Replenishment Management The master and distribution planning process allocates products for certain markets and the products are then allocated to the dealer, distributor, or customer through sales organization strategies and rules. The ordering process is then executed within the boundaries of these allocations.
Order Promising is the process of taking a distributor customer request for a product configuration and providing an accurate delivery date for that request. Order promising may also provide alternatives and tradeoffs for the distributor or customer to consider. These tradeoffs may include time (delivery date), product option content, and price. The promise date is derived by directly scheduling the product against inventory (locate-to-order), the sequence and master schedule (configure-to-order), and the production plan (build-to-order), within the industrial manufacturer's allocation policies.
Order Configuration and Pricing is the process of creating a valid product configuration and pricing it prior to promising and order capture. This process includes taking the dealer, distributor, or customer through an easier 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. Order management can provide a single face to the customer, as well as provide visibility of the order status throughout its lifecycle across multiple enterprises.
Outbound Transportation and Containerization Optimization is the process of managing and optimizing the outbound shipment of products from production facilities through distribution centers to dealers, retailers, distributors, customers, and ports of export. It can include load and route planning, three-dimensional containerization and load building, carrier mode selection, dock scheduling, intelligent shipment splitting, support for just in time (JIT)/milk-runs, as well as management and financial settlement of transportation transactions.
Material Flow Management
Material flow management for industrial manufacturers encompasses the processes of optimizing the inbound supply network and linking to the design process, and planning, as well as managing supplier capacities and schedules. Material flow management can also include the generation of material replenishment schedules as well as the execution of replenishments including transportation and logistics.
i2 has designed solutions for:
Inbound Supply Network Optimization is designed to provide industrial manufacturers with the ability to optimize the structure of their inbound supply chains—including internal and external capacities; inventory locations and quantities; logistics; containers; and part plans. Inbound supply network optimization can provide the capability to consider different scenarios, including global versus local sourcing to arrive at the least-landed cost approach for part supply.
Material Replenishment Scheduling is the process of developing constrained optimized replenishment schedules to satisfy the needs of part, component, and system production. Material replenishment scheduling can include the development of part replenishment schedules while considering banking requirements, transportation routes, supplier allocations, and different replenishment strategies, including delivery to forecast, delivery to just in time (JIT), and delivery to push.
Supplier Schedule and Capacity Management Collaboration involves the process of validating, communicating, and collaborating on material requirements to satisfy production. Supplier schedule and capacity management and collaboration occurs in the planning realm to ensure that plans are valid before being passed to scheduling and execution.
Lean Supply Management is designed to provide the ability to efficiently manage the execution of inbound material replenishments. Lean supply management can provide workflows to manage different replenishment strategies that are commonly used by industrial manufacturers, including customer scheduled shipment (CSS), pull-based replenishment (PBR),sequenced parts supply (SPS), and supplier managed inventory (SMI). It can provide the ability to process shipping notices (ASNs), receipts, and invoices; as well as manage events, and collaborate on exceptions.
Inbound Transportation Optimization is designed to provide the ability to create optimal shipments and loads for inbound supply of material to assembly and component facilities. Optimal plans are created within the context of various supply chain constraints.
Transportation Management and Supply Chain Visibility
Transportation management includes the workflows required to plan, optimize, and execute the industrial 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.
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 industrial companies can require more iterative negotiation types, such as request for information (RFI), request for proposal (RFP), and RFQ. The process also can require the ability to source entire, multi-line-item bill of materials 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 industrial manufacturers to quickly analyze bids and perform multi-supplier allocation. This 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 lifecycle 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 and firm orders, ASNs, order changes, 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.
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