White Papers and Demos

Reduced expenses, improved productivity, and increased revenue are the most recognized business results experienced by Infor Supply Chain Execution customers. With over 600 customers and more than 1,500 implementations, Infor presents the worldwide community with an unmatched portfolio of solutions deployed in a diverse collection of customer accounts, while maintaining unparalleled financial strength. Infor’s ability to implement and support Supply Chain Execution solutions with customers, and positively impact their business in over 35 countries around the world, sets the benchmark for the industry.

It’s a fact of life that manufacturers who mix, blend, brew, cook, react, or distill face different scheduling challenges from those in other industries—challenges that aren’t met by conventional ERP planning software or assembly-based scheduling systems. Infor Advanced Scheduling is a sophisticated, constraint-based scheduling solution that addresses these differences, including the real-world challenges of managing the capacity of vessels, tanks, and lines—and the flow of product between them.

A prediction is different than a forecast. A prediction foretells a future event. A forecast presents the probability that an event will occur during a specific timeframe. One is a statistic, the other a probability. For demand planning, probabilistic forecasting delivers more value—it supports better decision making about critical issues such as safety stock levels, production plans, and replenishment strategies. To make plans that help your business thrive, you need demand planning systems built to automatically recognize and manage the issues that matter, so that you can easily make realistic preparations for the most likely situations.

You’re confident you’ve established the right strategic goals for your company. You’re also confident you and your team have the analytical abilities and business instincts to deliver on that strategy. But are you as confident about getting the information you need to make decisions that ensure your profitability in the next quarter, the next year, and over the long-term?

It’s no longer enough to optimize the performance of each segment of your supply chain. To reach top performance, you need to view and operate your entire supply chain as a unified whole that encompasses participants both inside and outside the company, including customers, contractors, and suppliers. Studies show that companies with the most fully integrated supply chain technology invariably rank among the top industry performers in every respect. End-to-end supply chain visibility combined with an efficient execution system can help you make better decisions and execute those decisions more quickly and profitably.

For food, beverage, chemical, and other process manufacturers, the use of volume-based assets such as tanks, silos, drums, and vats can make the production scheduling process extremely complex. To effectively schedule volumes, process manufacturers need solutions designed for the unique needs of their industry. However, many solutions are not equipped to manage the challenges of volume scheduling.

This paper looks at the challenge of managing the forecasts for sporadic and/or slow moving parts within normal business forecasting processes. It discusses techniques that have been developed to forecast demand and manage the inventory for such items. These techniques have proven to be generally applicable for many items with a sparse demand pattern—not just true slow movers, but also those items that sell in large volumes when they do sell.