Supplier Collaboration

The best plans come through cross-function input. So rather than keeping the plan to itself, we encourage supply chain teams to share and collaborate – not to avoid blame but to mitigate risk and maximise the potential upside of reduced costs and increased sales.

Improving the supply plan through greater visibility

Within SO99+, the Supplier Collaboration Hub (SCH) is a web-based portal for publishing the company’s supply plan. It is a visibility and collaboration platform for enhanced planning with suppliers across the extended end-to-end network.

With SO99+ providing a powerful optimisation engine, SCH publishes planned delivery quantities to major vendors and gets back confirmation or variations from the vendor.  Because SO99+ creates a min-max replenishment tunnel, SCH can communicate an extra degree of freedom to the supplier network, allowing them to optimise their operations around a range of available options.

SCH provides a work flow for suppliers to communicate revisions to the supply plan. The web-based portal provides a simple-to-use environment where inexperienced users can collaborate in the supply planning process. SCH adds web-based scalability, seamlessly integrated with SO99+.

The net result is a single consensus supply plan that can then be fed back to Supply Chain Planning (SCP) or Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process. SCH can be configured for both “upstream” and “downstream” collaboration. In the upstream configuration, supply proposals are shared with the company’s suppliers. In the downstream configuration, VMI proposals are shared with the company’s dealers.