Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite is the ultimate solution for small and medium-sized businesses seeking to optimize their supply chain planning.
As the world continues to face supply chain challenges, confidently predicting supply and demand is non-negotiable for inventory-holding businesses. To achieve this level of predictability, businesses must invest in the right technology to maintain the optimal balance of inventory levels, ensuring the right products are available at the right time to meet customer demand.
So what’s the right technology? A predictive supply chain planning solution leverages data-driven insights to make proactive and informed decisions throughout the supply chain. With predictive technology, businesses can remain agile, responsive, and one step ahead of their competitors!
As your business’s operations matures and increases in complexity, partner with a planning solution that will be able to quickly adapt and support this growth.
Let’s discover more about Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite.
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Businesses need to be agile. Apart from changing customer demand, your competitors are likely stepping up their supply chain toolset with new technologies to help them plan more efficiently.
So, for your business to remain competitive and meet customers expectations, you’ll need to work with tools that can adapt as your business’s operations increase in complexity.
What is predictive planning?
Supply chain technologies are continuously evolving, ensuring businesses can quickly pivot and restructure their planning if necessary, to still meet demand on time. Using data and analytics, predictive planning is a non-negotiable must-have for businesses to help reduce costs and improve efficiency by avoiding stock-outs and excess inventory. Businesses can also better allocate resources, optimize production schedules, and respond quickly to changes in demand.
Businesses like LMC Truck and Ubique Group transformed their demand planning processes by reducing excess stock and improving customer fill rate by over 15%.
Moving beyond managing inventory manually
Businesses should assess their maturity level and recognize the appropriate time to transition from manual inventory management systems. As a business evolves, its complexity increases, making it crucial to invest in advanced technologies and evaluate internal processes to ensure readiness to meet demand. While many businesses still rely on spreadsheets for inventory management, cloud-based supply chain planning software presents substantial benefits.
Spreadsheets can work in small businesses that have a few simple SKUs with no other inventory complexities. For a manufacturing company like ours, where we have around 700 SKUs and need to forecast and plan for raw materials, it takes an enormous amount of time, guesswork, and going backward and forward to various departments – Murray Tairney, Purchase Manager at Davey Textiles.
Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite provides out-of-the-box functionality and an intuitive user interface that allows teams to get up to speed rapidly, realizing inventory and supply and demand improvements from day one. Customers can quickly analyze their inventory landscape using Netstock’s powerful predictive forecasting tools and adopt a plan that maximizes their inventory and investments.
Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite: An out-of-the-box solution
Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite, powered by AI technology, is a powerful and user-friendly solution offering advanced supply chain planning capabilities to help businesses conquer supply and demand challenges. Regardless of the size or maturity of your business, the suite offers advanced forecasting capabilities, automated replenishment, and inventory classification. The suite provides SMBs globally with the tools and resources they need to rapidly conquer supply and demand challenges and stay ahead of their competition, including:
- An easy to navigate user-friendly interface
- Netstock’s Learning Academy, based on decades of industry knowledge
- Exceptional onboarding and customer support
- Guaranteed data integrity by being ISO 27001 certified
Bison Gear needed visibility of their inventory and bill of materials (BOM) so they could quickly make the best planning decisions for their business without incurring more stock. “The ability to have all the information in one place has freed up some of our employee’s time enabling them to focus on other things, which has been a huge ROI for us,” says Chuck Albanese, Director of Materials, Bison Gear.
Netstock’s suite offers a single-view dashboard with real-time visibility into inventory levels, reorder points, lead times, and order constraints. Additionally, the suite helps more businesses manage supplier disruptions by monitoring supplier performance and identifying reliable suppliers. Businesses can achieve balanced inventory investment by determining lead time reliability, supplier risk, and other critical factors.
6 Customer challenges Netstock helps businesses overcome
1. No visibility
Hartland Controls maintains a large inventory of finished products. With more than 3,000 SKUs to manage, they found their process needed to be more reliable as they had to review each item manually. They had no visibility of stock-outs or potential stock-outs and no way to calculate their safety stock.
We have full visibility of our potential stock-outs and could take actionable steps to avoid stock-outs from occurring. With the help of the advanced algorithms, we were able to do our forecasts with confidence and would not have been able to bounce back as quickly as we did from COVID-19 without Netstock – Becky Wilkinson, Supply Chain Manager, Hartland Controls.
Netstock provides a single-view dashboard where all internal stakeholders can access and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and align supply planning with future demand. Businesses can access reorder points, lead times, and order constraints to make quicker decisions. With real-time predictive data, businesses can automatically adjust their planning, including forecasting, ordering, capacity planning, and safety stock levels, allowing them to focus on the critical aspects of their business.
2. Supplier disruption
Prospectors needed help balancing their inventory investment, overstocking some items, yet running out on others. For Prospectors, the main issue during COVID-19 has been extended and erratic lead times for incoming deliveries. Having a fit-for-purpose tool helped Prospectors plan better in the face of longer lead times during COVID-19 disruptions.
The most significant ROI for Prospectors was how Netstock improved its fill rate. Our fill rate has improved by over 30% since we implemented Netstock – Spencer Keast, Country Manager, Prospectors.
The suite reduces supplier risk, and increases fill rates, giving businesses a competitive edge and offering unrivaled customer service. Monitor supplier performance, identify reliable suppliers, improve lead time with accurate supplier data, factor lead time reliability into replenishment decisions, automatically adjust safety stock in line with supplier risk, and optimize your supplier network.
3. Managing excess inventory
Best Vinyl’s ordering process consisted of very complicated Excel spreadsheets. Besides the propensity for human error, Justin Comish, COO of Best Vinyl, needed to set aside one full day to prepare his orders. He continuously felt that the data he was working with was unreliable, prompting him to seek an improved inventory management solution. Netstock was implemented and integrated with their Acumatica ERP solution.
Thanks to Netstock, we could navigate the supply chain challenges brought on by the pandemic with minimal disruption to our business. I can only imagine how much better we will be with our planning now that things have started to stabilize, says Justin Comish, Chief Operating Officer, Best Vinyl.
Reduce overstocking, lower carrying costs, and improve profitability by optimizing inventory levels with Netstock’s suite Providing automatic replenishment ensures that you order the right amount of inventory required.
4. Inaccurate forecasting
To illustrate the effectiveness of Netstock’s solution, Edwards Garment achieved a $900,000 reduction in inventory write-offs after deploying the software. By leveraging similar products’ historical size curves, seasonality, and history, Edwards Garment can accurately forecast new items.
Having this visibility and seeing that the information is correct gives us confidence and trust that our decision to invest in Netstock IBP was the right one – Steven Allgood, Director of Inventory Management, Edwards Garment.
Inaccurate forecasting is a common challenge businesses face when it comes to supply chain planning. Our Predictive Planning Suite addresses this issue with its enhanced forecasting capabilities using machine learning technology. The solution allows for collaboration and measurement of forecasting accuracy to ensure accountability and drive continual improvement.
5. Scalability
DaySpring selected Netstock because of its highly scalable architecture and capabilities for sales forecasting, inventory optimization, and sales and operations planning. They were impressed by the usability of the solution and its ability to support the full range of planning functionality. After a little over a year, they reduced inventories in the boxed cards product line by 65%, down from an average of about 2 million units to 700,000.
Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite will help scale your planning by providing an entry-point solution for basic inventory management requirements. It fulfills the needs of businesses requiring only demand planning and easily scales up complexity and functionality when moving to the next level bundle or additional expert modules.
6. Flexibility
Shimano’s North American Bicycle Inc. was able to leverage better inventory planning with increased responsiveness on Amazon’s marketplace after integrating Netstock with its Oracle ERP system.
According to Rick Barrosa, Senior Manager of Supply Chain, Shimano, it only took about a month to integrate Netstock, and our planning immediately became more agile.
Businesses need the ability to quickly change their approach to supply chain planning to adapt to market changes. We address this by allowing businesses to respond rapidly to marketplace changes and leverage predictive analytics to deploy new market approaches.
How businesses can plan for or reduce inventory risk
Inventory risk looks at the negative impact that inventory planning can have on a business. This risk can arise from various factors such as overstocking or understocking, inaccurate demand forecasting, insufficient inventory controls, and ineffective supply chain management. These risks can lead to increased costs, decreased revenue, decreased customer satisfaction, and reduced profitability.
To mitigate these risks, businesses can use predictive analytics to analyze past financial data and identify trends, which can help them accurately forecast future revenues, expenses, and cash flows. This enhances inventory decisions, ultimately leading to improved financial performance.
Predictive analytics can also equip finance teams to identify potential risks and how to proactively mitigate them by optimizing operations and identifying areas for cost savings and process improvements, analyzing financial data, and identifying inefficiencies.
Netstock’s Predictive Planning Suite is built for agility and is the ultimate solution for SMBs seeking to synchronize business processes with sales & operations planning. With powerful predictive planning algorithms, an intuitive user interface, enhanced functionality, and world-class ERP integrations, the suite enables you to respond to market changes and unlock the data in your ERP to extract powerful insights to make informed decisions.
