Supply Chain – Echelon Solution Group

COVID-19 Response

New Normal: Supply Chain

The recent COVID-19 emergency has disrupted businesses all over the world, and that has had a major impact on the Supply Chains across the globe. This disruption has reminded us all that “change is the only constant” and that having a well-designed, nimble Supply Chain to respond to those changes is fundamental for minimizing the impact of unforeseen situations. Depending on where your Supply Chain was when the crisis hit, your needs may range from immediate responses through Crisis War Room help to a short- or mid-term re-thinking of your Supply Chain processes or Strategy going forward. Whatever your need is, Echelon has the right resources to help you.

Supply Chain Process 360 Degrees Assessment

Have you already figured out how “the new normal” has impacted your core processes and strategies? Did you have a clear set of indicators, artifacts and the adequate discipline to measure, monitor and react to the changes before the COVID-19 crisis? Do you have those now? What have you learned? How have you translated those learnings into action for your core processes?

By doing an integral assessment of your current core processes, data and functionality in the SAP system, Echelon can help you determine what functionality you may not be using that you should use to help make your processes more efficient, what data you should adjust and how, and what indicators to look at and how to obtain them. Make sure you “crisis-proof” your processes, data and system by making the right fact-based adjustments in all the meaningful areas.

Echelon can partner with you for these 360 Degrees Assessments in the following areas, individually or combined in any way necessary:

Overall Supply Chain Planning, from Demand to Supply

Procurement

Manufacturing Scheduling & Execution
Inventory Management
Sales & Distribution

SCM Planning in the New Scenario

Supply Chain Planning is one of the key areas of the supply chain in your SAP environment, and one of the trickiest ones. It is not uncommon that MRP, MPS, Capacity Planning, Finite Scheduling and others are regarded as “black boxes” where things happen without a real understanding of why they are happening. Many Planners follow scripts of what to do, and which buttons to press to react to the planning results, but do not properly understand how to change or adapt the Planning models as a response to new situations. Many Planning processes are set up under a “one-size-fits-all” concept.

In order to properly tune up your Planning process to react to the new realities, a detailed analysis of the underlying data model and a thorough understanding of the different Planning parameters is a must.

Echelon can help you walk this path, and provide you the right tools to create the knowledge in your organization in order to make this a dynamic and repeatable process, in line with the demand for speed in changing and adapting to the new situations the uncertain times we are living will bring.

Supply Chain War Room Support

As the “new normal” has completely disrupted everyone’s “business as usual”, a series of quick, on-the-spot decisions must be made in order to keep up the right Service Levels to customers without sacrificing your manufacturing and your working capital efficiency in the back-end of your supply chain.

In order to do this properly, you need quick fast access to multiple data points and indicators on a daily basis which may not be readily available for you with your current tools. Those tools may have been designed to monitor your business on a more stable environment over long periods of time, but right now the ground beneath your feet is moving and shifting daily, on both ends of the supply chain (Customers and Vendors).

Echelon can offer you the expert knowledge of our Supply Chain professionals in order to quickly extract the relevant information from any area of the system and make the right connections between the different data elements that will allow you to take those fact-based, well-informed decisions on a daily basis and provide the grounds for incorporating these to your ongoing operations in the long run.

Supply Chain Contingency Playbook

All companies have developed contingency plans over the past decades. Many of them have tested them. Only a few had to implement them, up until now.

The disruption in the Supply Chain that the COVID-19 has produced, exposed a number of weaknesses on these Contingency Plans, due to either a relative lack of depth in the actual processes and procedures (what exactly to do, when and how) or due to shortcomings of a design based on a local/minor contingencies as opposed to based on major, global-scale contingencies. Companies are learning this the hard way.

Echelon can help you in two ways: on one hand, we can help you quickly bridge the gap between high-level plans and detailed actions (at the process, people and technology levels) for your immediate needs; on the other hand, we can help you capture the learnings of this crisis and get more solid and robust plans for the future, as we know this situation is far from over and different industries, states and countries will be affected differently and will come back to normal differently. This will be the “new normal”. Let us help you plan for it.

Here to Help Your Every Business Need

We focus on the IT solutions, so you can focus on your business. See what we can do for you today!