RapidResponse Resolution Engine gives manufacturers proactive management capabilities that allow key personnel within various departments and across the extended supply chain, both locally and internationally, to drive effective resolutions to continually changing situations. In other words, instead of producing optimized answers for a utopian and static world, the engine produces a series of alternate action plans for a real and dynamic world.
Iterative modeling capabilities enable team members to propose and detail a number of potential action alternatives that quickly and accurately simulate their entire MRP runs. The embedded algorithms are based on concepts, methods, and definitions contained in APICS studies, such as lean manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints (see Reflections on Lean Philosophy and the Theory of Constraints). In the future, capabilities might extend to the Du Pont profitability model and the generic supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model by the Supply Chain Council, which communicates SCM best practice benchmarks across companies.
The engine’s publishing capabilities enable participants and external suppliers to instantly share suggestions (collaborate) with other group members in real time over the Web. Moreover, multiple security and authorization level controls allow businesses to specify which users may access specific information. Varying combinations of potential responses to changes, such as doubling shifts in a factory, changing engineering specifications, procuring from a different supplier, buying a new machine to increase production capacity, or many others can be instantly modeled and shared online, enabling group participants to merge independent action options and determine which choice is best. Task flows that outline steps for specific activities can be customized to meet the user company’s needs and facilitate the resolution process.
3. Live Scorecard
Live Scorecard enables manufacturers to holistically compare alternative what-if action plans based on real-time information. By scoring proposed action plans against predetermined, real-world corporate performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), Live Scorecard aims at ensuring that any chosen course of action conforms to both day-to-day and long-term overall business objectives and best practices. As the action team assesses the impact of change and explores optional alternative solutions, it should be driven by a balanced scorecard view of business operations.
The scorecard presents operational results “scored” by corporate goals and objectives, where the objectives of business units, departments, and the entire enterprise are aligned. Often, varied disciplines within an enterprise (for example, asset liability management, profitability management, budgeting, forecasting, strategic planning, etc.) are performed separately and inefficiently despite the many similarities among them. The suboptimization of one process inevitably comes at the expense of others, such as the all-too-common scenario of a plant manager chasing higher utilization and efficiency, only to flood the warehouse with unneeded inventory levels.
This problem generally occurs because management does not have a comprehensive overview of the company, while department heads remain accountable only for their departmental strategy—they are not aware of other departments’ data and issues, which might influence their decisions. Thus, a scorecard is an effective tool to ensure management focuses on key business issues in the world of rapid business change and endless global competition.
With Kinaxis RapidResponse, the impact of change is continuously made known to the action team through a live scorecard view. Consequently, costs of the alternatives and their impact on the customer are explored, analyzed, and assessed, and the results can be immediately shared within the action team. The action team stays focused on key corporate and customer objectives as it drives toward a goal-driven optimized solution. To that end, Live Scorecard drives best practices optimization, where trade-offs in costs, margin, customer satisfaction, and other key business issues must be balanced to realize business success. It provides immediate shared comparative results to simulation scenarios so that the team can understand the implications of change, such as a configuration change on a particular customer order and its implications for inventory, production, capacity, margin, etc.
More Enhancements
“Response management” as a software category has come from Kinaxis’s need to make the market aware that its offerings are much more than glorified event management applications, since SCEM has long been seen as providing merely passive visibility and alerts.
Kinaxis RapidResponse 7 introduced Live Scorecard and enhanced financial and engineering change analysis in late 2003, and at the end of 2005, Kinaxis RapidResponse 8 shifted from a client-server architecture to a Web services approach, using .NET on the back-end server and Java for clients. The release also boosted performance, partly by increasing the amount of data that the software can crunch to 128 gigabytes, which is crucial for the high volume of items, transactions, and simulations within most complex discrete manufacturing networks. It also featured customer-enabled setup, enhanced alerting (with links to scorecards), as well as partner product integrations, such as reporting and analytics from Cognos.
In mid-2006, Kinaxis introduced the RapidResponse Glass Pipeline as a standard feature of its on-demand Kinaxis RapidResponse service. Seeing that outsourcing was becoming a growing trend, Kinaxis realized that adoption of a software as a service (SaaS) solution to solve supply chain challenges could be a natural extension of a brand owner or contract manufacturer’s outsourcing activities—an extension that offers many compelling operational benefits.
Iterative modeling capabilities enable team members to propose and detail a number of potential action alternatives that quickly and accurately simulate their entire MRP runs. The embedded algorithms are based on concepts, methods, and definitions contained in APICS studies, such as lean manufacturing and the Theory of Constraints (see Reflections on Lean Philosophy and the Theory of Constraints). In the future, capabilities might extend to the Du Pont profitability model and the generic supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model by the Supply Chain Council, which communicates SCM best practice benchmarks across companies.
The engine’s publishing capabilities enable participants and external suppliers to instantly share suggestions (collaborate) with other group members in real time over the Web. Moreover, multiple security and authorization level controls allow businesses to specify which users may access specific information. Varying combinations of potential responses to changes, such as doubling shifts in a factory, changing engineering specifications, procuring from a different supplier, buying a new machine to increase production capacity, or many others can be instantly modeled and shared online, enabling group participants to merge independent action options and determine which choice is best. Task flows that outline steps for specific activities can be customized to meet the user company’s needs and facilitate the resolution process.
3. Live Scorecard
Live Scorecard enables manufacturers to holistically compare alternative what-if action plans based on real-time information. By scoring proposed action plans against predetermined, real-world corporate performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), Live Scorecard aims at ensuring that any chosen course of action conforms to both day-to-day and long-term overall business objectives and best practices. As the action team assesses the impact of change and explores optional alternative solutions, it should be driven by a balanced scorecard view of business operations.
The scorecard presents operational results “scored” by corporate goals and objectives, where the objectives of business units, departments, and the entire enterprise are aligned. Often, varied disciplines within an enterprise (for example, asset liability management, profitability management, budgeting, forecasting, strategic planning, etc.) are performed separately and inefficiently despite the many similarities among them. The suboptimization of one process inevitably comes at the expense of others, such as the all-too-common scenario of a plant manager chasing higher utilization and efficiency, only to flood the warehouse with unneeded inventory levels.
This problem generally occurs because management does not have a comprehensive overview of the company, while department heads remain accountable only for their departmental strategy—they are not aware of other departments’ data and issues, which might influence their decisions. Thus, a scorecard is an effective tool to ensure management focuses on key business issues in the world of rapid business change and endless global competition.
With Kinaxis RapidResponse, the impact of change is continuously made known to the action team through a live scorecard view. Consequently, costs of the alternatives and their impact on the customer are explored, analyzed, and assessed, and the results can be immediately shared within the action team. The action team stays focused on key corporate and customer objectives as it drives toward a goal-driven optimized solution. To that end, Live Scorecard drives best practices optimization, where trade-offs in costs, margin, customer satisfaction, and other key business issues must be balanced to realize business success. It provides immediate shared comparative results to simulation scenarios so that the team can understand the implications of change, such as a configuration change on a particular customer order and its implications for inventory, production, capacity, margin, etc.
More Enhancements
“Response management” as a software category has come from Kinaxis’s need to make the market aware that its offerings are much more than glorified event management applications, since SCEM has long been seen as providing merely passive visibility and alerts.
Kinaxis RapidResponse 7 introduced Live Scorecard and enhanced financial and engineering change analysis in late 2003, and at the end of 2005, Kinaxis RapidResponse 8 shifted from a client-server architecture to a Web services approach, using .NET on the back-end server and Java for clients. The release also boosted performance, partly by increasing the amount of data that the software can crunch to 128 gigabytes, which is crucial for the high volume of items, transactions, and simulations within most complex discrete manufacturing networks. It also featured customer-enabled setup, enhanced alerting (with links to scorecards), as well as partner product integrations, such as reporting and analytics from Cognos.
In mid-2006, Kinaxis introduced the RapidResponse Glass Pipeline as a standard feature of its on-demand Kinaxis RapidResponse service. Seeing that outsourcing was becoming a growing trend, Kinaxis realized that adoption of a software as a service (SaaS) solution to solve supply chain challenges could be a natural extension of a brand owner or contract manufacturer’s outsourcing activities—an extension that offers many compelling operational benefits.
0 comments:
Post a Comment