Continuous Replenishment

The Challenge

With the increased focus on producing and delivering a wider variety of goods more cost effectively than the competition, supply chain expenses are being scrutinized as never before. Organizations are constantly challenged to find the right balance between delivering goods on time to customer specifications and the need to continually optimize loads, maximize deliveries, and fully utilize transportation assets.

Every day, traffic and logistics managers are focused on optimizing the ‘Plant to Depot’  flow of goods, the loading of each vehicle, developing cost-effective delivery schedules, and meeting delivery time windows and inventory requirements.  Of course, while all of this is going on, they also need to deal with inaccurate forecasts and limited supplies!

The Solution:  OptiLogix™  for Continuous Replenishment

A customized OptiLogix™  continuous replenishment implementation enables these decision makers to consolidate information from various sources to develop rationalized plans that optimally balance available resources, constraints, and opportunities.

Contrary to the problem of supply chain network design, there is no definite, single mathematical modeling technique or heuristic that can be applied successfully to all types of replenishment problems.  As with most Technologix implementations, these algorithms and heuristics will be determined as a function of the scope and operational problem to be solved.  The application, though, will maintain the same OptiLogix™  framework and interface common to all our solutions.

As part of our replenishment solutions we have deployed customized algorithms and heuristics in the following areas:

• Forecasting and inventory control
• Distribution requirement planning
• Load building and consolidation
• Dispatch scheduling
• Routing
• Synchronization of Demand and Supply

Key Features:

• Offers an integrated and automated forecasting-to-delivery solution
• Incorporates state-of-the-art dispatching, routing, inventory control and scheduling algorithms
• Synchronizes demand and product supply
• Synchronizes dispatch and destination time windows
• Integrates and interfaces with corporate sources of data (SAP, JD Edwards, Oracle, etc.)
• Offers graphical, mapping and reporting display of data and schedules
• Customizes implementations to fit organizational needs and restrictions

Key Benefits:

• Increases order accuracy and on-time delivery performance
• Decreases transportation costs due to better utilization factors
• Improves transport asset utilization
• Facilitates development of ‘what if’ scenarios
• Empowers decision makers to rationalize transportation assets
• Increases overall process effectiveness due to improved synchronization