Key Benefits of Quintiq Company Planner
Demand Fulfillment and Flexibility
Today’s business environment is more competitive than ever, making it essential that you meet customers’ demands. Optimal company performance demands, among other things, flexible order acceptance, delivery confidence, full supply utilization, and exceptional customer service. The Quintiq Company Planner helps you achieve all this and much more. It enables you to:
- Check available capacity and inventory levels
- Ensure materials availability, in alignment with customer reservations
- Provide reliable and exact due date quoting
- And more
All this translates into higher on-time delivery rates with less variability, and improved customer service, producing superior customer satisfaction and greater profitability.
Cost Transparency
Wouldn’t it be valuable to have real-time insight into exact production costs at any given moment? Full cost transparency guarantees you make informed decisions when accepting or declining orders. The Full Cost Transparency option in the Quintiq Planner enables metal companies to flexibly allocate supplies according to demand, increase throughput, and improve on–time delivery performance. Moreover, flexibly allocating supply according to channel demand ensures exceptional customer service levels. With full cost transparency, your company will locate major cost drivers and cut unnecessary costs.
Revenue Optimization
The Quintiq Company Planner optimizes the ability-to-promise process, providing extensive flexibility in terms of capacity allocations. The Revenue Optimization option provides insight into profitability at the order, the customer and the product level. This enables intelligent decision-making regarding changing allocations during the order promise and production process. Daily optimization of order priorities, order costs, allocated capacity, and due dates provides you with better leverage in due date and price negotiations and in accepting only the most profitable orders.
Inventory Optimization and VMI
Inadequate knowledge of inventory levels as a result of low supply chain visibility can carry a painfully high cost, causing unplanned machine stoppages, excessive inventory and insufficient material availability. Inventory optimization is a new approach designed to balance the costs of maintaining inventory with the costs of lost business, service penalties and expediting should inventory not be available. Inventory optimization focuses on modeling uncertainty and variability, and minimizing supply chain risks. The Inventory Optimization option in the Quintiq Company Planner helps maintain minimum inventory levels while still ensuring flexibility in the production process and fulfillment of customers’ demands. The Quintiq Inventory Optimization option also supports vendor managed inventories (VMI) and consignment stocks. With the Quintiq Company Planner, your company benefits from reduced inventory levels, with full confidence that the right inventory is available at the right time and place.
Customer Analysis
Low customer satisfaction and lost sales results from a lack of insight into current and past customer performance and customer service performance. The Quintiq Company Planner enables you to access past customer performance and to monitor current customer performance. It makes it possible to perform sophisticated customer analysis to optimize future production schedules. With the Company Planner, you plan your schedules per customer, product, and product family or at the individual order level. With your personnel performing better because they are up-to-date and sufficiently informed, you can achieve dramatically improved overall company performance.
Supplier Performance Analysis
Critical and costly planning problems result from poor supplier performance. When suppliers do not deliver on time, planning schedules must be modified, resulting in missed delivery dates. Even worse, disruptions in the supply chain can lose you customers. A transparent overview of your suppliers’ performance simplifies planning. The Supplier Performance Analysis option in the Quintiq Company Planner lets you view supplier performance in real time and in full detail, including per product family and per order. This option enables you to run complex analyses comparing suppliers in terms of reliability, costs and various other variables, giving you the information you need to build the most profitable sourcing strategy.
Dynamic Campaign Optimization
Campaign planning is vital to every business because efficient campaign planning significantly cuts costs and increases productivity. However, most campaign planning offers only very limited flexibility in coping with order changes or production process disturbances. This results in poor customer service levels and capacity losses. The unique Quintiq dynamic campaign planning approach combines the production-boosting advantages of campaigns with the flexibility to adapt to unforeseen events or changed order priorities.
Make-or-Buy Support
Whether to make or buy is a fundamental dilemma faced by many businesses today. Worldwide competition forces metal companies to frequently re-assess production costs and capacities and to constantly search for lower cost alternatives. Taking into account requirements for all semi-finished products and your plant’s present and future capacity constraints, the Make-or-Buy Support option in the Quintiq Company Planner recommends whether to make or buy individual products at every step of your supply chain. With Make-or-Buy Support, your plant produces at the lowest possible cost while reaching production targets set by your organization.
Performance Analysis
Supply chains are becoming increasingly complex as more businesses decide to move or outsource production to low-cost manufacturing centers. Effective supply chain management demands global visibility of capabilities, constraints and variables in an organization’s systems, as well as the ability to optimize profitability across those options. The Performance Analysis option in the Quintiq Company Planner provides a complete analysis of your supply chain in terms of:
With these performance indicators, you make accurate decisions that improve productivity and performance.
Material Flow Synchronization
Has your plant ever experienced wandering bottlenecks? Divergent production, in which a limited number of raw materials end up as a diverse range of alloy grades and dimensions, is a typical metal plant configuration that often suffers from wandering bottlenecks. By using the Material Flow Synchronization option in the Quintiq Company Planner, your materials flow is synchronized throughout the whole plant, not just in a few areas. Optimizing materials flow reduces unplanned stoppages and factory downtime due to lack of materials. You benefit from a harmonized production process with fewer interruptions from wandering bottlenecks.
Capacity Optimization
Efficient capacity utilization is a formidable challenge that every organization wrestles with. Because full finite capacity optimization is an extremely complex puzzle, many organizations resign themselves to flawed resource planning based on either infinite capacity or select finite capacity. However, adaptive finite capacity optimization, which takes into account changes in the process and environment, provides metal plants with exceptional agility – a valuable competitive edge. The Capacity Optimization option in the Quintiq Company Planner excels at adaptive finite capacity planning, allowing you to make informed, accurate decisions about how to best use resources and capacities. The Capacity Optimization option is powerful enough and flexible enough for easy modification of pre-defined strategies when confronted with unforeseen developments, such as changes in customers’ orders that require additional capacity. The result: optimal use of machine, materials, and labor resources.