General Manufacturing Industry: Keep Winning on Quality, Efficiency, and Service
What has the global economy done for you lately? If you’re like most general manufacturers, you’re torn between feeling grateful for new sourcing options and feeling threatened by the competitors that seem to spring up overnight. A tighter competitive environment is putting pressure on your profits—and even a broader range of choices isn’t preventing overall commodity prices from rising. Meanwhile, political trends such as trade tariffs, a decelerating Chinese market, and a disruptive Brexit are making it more complicated than ever to run your plants at a reliable profit.
The Demand Solutions Digital Supply Chain Platform can help general manufacturers respond to these competitive pressures by finding the optimal mix of quality, efficiency, and service.
General manufacturers use Demand Solutions to:
- Respond to seasonality and demand variability by achieving one-number planning.
- Optimize production, scheduling, and changeovers across multiple plants.
- Deliver excellent service at the lowest cost by optimizing inventory among multi-echelon supply chain points using demand sensing.
- Gauge the cost of servicing any account using customer-specific forecasting capabilities, “what-if” analysis, and time-phased inventory policies.
- Ensure in-stock availability by synchronizing demand and supply on a daily basis.
Deliver Better Service in a Make-to-Stock World
If you could build any product on-demand, there’d be no question about your ability to fight off competitors and win lasting customer loyalty. But ours is a make-to-stock world. Outpace your competitors by using better demand forecasting and inventory management technology to navigate the challenges of long lead times, lot sizes, distribution channels, geographical restrictions, and limited views of retail sales.
With Demand Solutions, general manufacturers can:
- Forecast demand in multiple units of measurement linked to specific markets.
- Boost the accuracy of demand forecasts by item, location, customer, and product group.
- Optimize inventories by automatically applying stocking policies based on sophisticated analysis and pre-set rankings.
- Maximize production in individual plants by managing multi-stage capacity constraints, changeovers, safety requirements, and more.
- Achieve a balance between desired service levels and inventory investments by setting optimal time-phased inventory targets.
