Periodic Assessment of your planning systems
It is extremely common in any organization to maintain status quo and not review the deployed solutions periodically unless the results are awfully incorrect having a significant business impact. Given the current economic downturn, it would be extremely critical to assess the performance of your advanced planning systems which help you to achieve a good balance between demand and supply while optimizing your inventory. The planning system would have been implemented a few years back or in boom time. Hence the solution configured in the planning system would not have factored in bad times. This becomes critical- as the results churned out of the planning system may not be in sync with the current business environment which would lead to bad decision or too much of manual intervention is necessary for review and modifications.
It is extremely important that the solution deployed is reviewed not only in such bad times but also periodically in order to ensure that the results are in line with the constantly changing business environment. For example, it is extremely necessary to review the different planning parameters which act as input to your planning engine. For example, safety stock levels you would want to maintain during different business environment would be much different- ranging from days of coverage to say statistical/dynamic. These parameters which are input to your planning engine will impact the results what you get.
Having this planning system audit or health check should form a part of your yearly or half yearly planning process review. This would ensure that you take corrective actions at appropriate times and even if no major correction is required, it will also give you opportunities to fine tune the solution deployed. Most of the times, there will not be a need for major changes and what will be required is slight tweaking of the solution.
Lot of times, organizations do get this opportunity when they have to upgrade to a new version of the software. In these cases rather than just doing a technical upgrade, the opportunity should be used to do a proper assessment of the solution while performing the upgrade.
I would like to understand if your organizations are doing it- and if yes the benefits realized. If no, what are the challenges/difficulties for not doing.
