In pursuit of agility and resilience amidst endless changes to the plan? Is your company’s approach to being responsive mostly an energy-draining daily firefight ? The solution may lie in understanding the root-causes of these constant changes, and strengthening your mid-term planning process and solutions. 

As external shocks sweep through every corner of today’s supply chain, practitioners are under immense pressure to respond accurately, de-risk supply chains and increase capacity. A lack of a strong mid-term planning process is leaving organizations stuck in an endless cycle of short-term changes to the operational plan. Disconnected business processes, organizational silos and outdated technologies are now even greater barriers to successful execution. How can manufacturers resolve this to be more agile and responsive?

A strong mid-term, tactical planning process bridges the transition from long-term strategic plans to near-term operational schedules. It provides feasible plans that respond to frequent changes, delivering much needed supply chain resilience. It should also enable teams to perform rapid what-if scenario planning. 

Mid-term planning needs to capture production line capacity availability and use accurately at different levels of product group aggregation. It should optimize to balance service, inventory and capacity goals. The result is a plan that is more realistically scheduled and executed, with fewer gaps that require the dreaded firefight.

Doing this manually in Excel is almost impossible because of the complexity required to properly model operational constraints. However, AI offers an excellent approach to delivering the necessary capabilities.

This e-book explores the importance of mid-term planning, its core building blocks and the role technology plays in its improvement. It also inspects why focusing on tactical planning will help supply chain practitioners reduce the number and magnitude of firefights in the scheduling and execution time-horizon.

Please CLICK HERE to download the white paper.