Distribution Requirements Planning

In the real world, things don’t always go as planned. Products sell more than predicted, or less. Deliveries from suppliers are late. Production equipment breaks down. You need the tools to uncover and understand what drives requirements, execute mid-course corrections a computer might miss, and better support crucial, cost-sensitive decisions.

Our S&OP software suite include a Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) module that highlights the “what”, “when”, “where”, and “how much” of each product that’s needed at each location in order to meet the forecast. These requirements are time-phased and prioritized. They can be extrapolated far into the future to plan human and material resources requirements effectively. Planners can quickly display the specific, detailed data and assumptions behind any requirement and adapt plans accordingly.

Constrained Planning

Constrained planning is the process of taking distribution requirements and smoothing them out to more efficiently utilize resources.

For example, some companies do most of their business during the summer.  They may need to build up inventories during the winter in order to have sufficient product on hand to meet their summer demand. In cases like this, constrained planning is used to generate a more feasible production or purchasing plan.

Our distribution planning software module provides the flexibility needed to handle even the most complex mix of constraining factors.

While other software products make planners enter massive amounts of control data in order to facilitate constrained planning, our DRP module derives the needed data from information already available from other steps of the S&OP process. This allows planners to spend their time planning, not keying in endless amounts of data.