global supply chain planning
Challenge
With operations in over 150 countries and over 50,000 employees, the client is one of the world’s leading researchers and producers of pharmaceutical and biotechnology products. The client desired to create a standard process of monitoring, planning and forecasting in its manufacturing facilities located in 37 countries in an effort to keep a tight rein on expenses. Over time, each facility had developed its own method of planning and forecasting. Different methods of planning and forecasting throughout the organization made obtaining a consistent view of future operations a laborious and time consuming effort, often fraught with inaccuracies. While the basic business model for each was nearly identical, the diverse methods of planning and forecasting made it extremely difficult for the client to leverage its size and scale to reduce costs and negotiate prices with its suppliers.
Engagement
We were engaged to design and deliver a comprehensive and consistent planning and monitoring system that would meet the following objectives:
Solution
Applying best practice and business process research, we worked in close collaboration with the client to design, prototype and build the solution, ensuring strong alignment with the overall vision and solving the end-user’s problems. Through several iterations of prototyping with formal user feedback, we designed a comprehensive solution encompassing several modules, e.g. Overhead, Facilities, Payroll, Staffing, Procurement, Production and Allocation, with each feeding into an overall Expense module. As anticipated, numerous challenges were faced and resolved in the process of developing the solution:
Results
Deployed to 1,300 employees in 37 countries, the system streamlined and automated all manufacturing processes, saving countless work hours during the monthly forecast and annual plan process. Moreover, the solution provided a globally consistent view of worldwide operations, which enabled strategic decision-making on long-term initiatives, such as: product line continuation, capital investment, training plans and purchasing decisions.
With operations in over 150 countries and over 50,000 employees, the client is one of the world’s leading researchers and producers of pharmaceutical and biotechnology products. The client desired to create a standard process of monitoring, planning and forecasting in its manufacturing facilities located in 37 countries in an effort to keep a tight rein on expenses. Over time, each facility had developed its own method of planning and forecasting. Different methods of planning and forecasting throughout the organization made obtaining a consistent view of future operations a laborious and time consuming effort, often fraught with inaccuracies. While the basic business model for each was nearly identical, the diverse methods of planning and forecasting made it extremely difficult for the client to leverage its size and scale to reduce costs and negotiate prices with its suppliers.
Engagement
We were engaged to design and deliver a comprehensive and consistent planning and monitoring system that would meet the following objectives:
- Encompass all facets of the planning process including supply chain, workforce and capital projects
- Possess sufficient flexibility to account for variation by location for currency, products and language
- Enable data to be moved into and out of the system multiple times per day
- Enable dynamic, user-defined, complex allocations of expense
Solution
Applying best practice and business process research, we worked in close collaboration with the client to design, prototype and build the solution, ensuring strong alignment with the overall vision and solving the end-user’s problems. Through several iterations of prototyping with formal user feedback, we designed a comprehensive solution encompassing several modules, e.g. Overhead, Facilities, Payroll, Staffing, Procurement, Production and Allocation, with each feeding into an overall Expense module. As anticipated, numerous challenges were faced and resolved in the process of developing the solution:
- Utilizing advanced modeling techniques, the users were provided an extremely flexible solution that created pre-calculated forecasts as well as the entry of manual adjustments. This allowed for an initial forecast to be created based on high level drivers and historical trends with the final fine tuning to be completed by the users. As a result, forecasts were created in a fraction of the time but were also more realistic as the users focused their efforts on the true decisions and not the mechanical spreadsheet work that had consumed their time in the past.
- A challenging requirement was to align the data movement of such a large amount of data across time zones so that each location had the information it needed at the right time to make the right decision. To allow for this data movement, a production process was developed based on extensive technical benchmark testing. Carefully designed error-checking with redundancies were developed to ensure that the process was “bullet-proof” and would run correctly without human intervention or monitoring.
- The real-time allocation module leveraged advanced functionality within the software along with a custom algorithm that allowed expenses to be allocated across cost centers, exported, calculated and then imported back into the appropriate cost center on demand.
Results
Deployed to 1,300 employees in 37 countries, the system streamlined and automated all manufacturing processes, saving countless work hours during the monthly forecast and annual plan process. Moreover, the solution provided a globally consistent view of worldwide operations, which enabled strategic decision-making on long-term initiatives, such as: product line continuation, capital investment, training plans and purchasing decisions.