Deliver quality improvement, customer satisfaction and higher profits with sound supply chain strategies.

In the Spotlight Beginning to End — Customer Demand Drives the Supply Chain by Dennie Norman, SAS marketing strategist for Supply Chain Intelligence

Rapid innovation and globalisation have generated tremendous opportunities and choices in the marketplace for consumers and companies alike. Competitive pressures have led to sourcing and manufacturing on a global scale, resulting in a significant increase in product offerings. As businesses grow more complex, so do their supply chains. Now more than ever, managers need tools that generate the insight that leads to smarter decision making and results in a more efficient supply chain.

Enhancing both the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall supply chain operations is a critical component in a company's ability to compete successfully. This is gained by better understanding and leveraging the customer base, through improving pricing and promotions, increasing yield, quality, and service levels, and through improving supplier strategies. From ERP systems to traditional supply chain management software, the market is filled with silo-based transactional systems that fall short in generating and delivering the performance-driving insights that seamlessly and profitably link supply with demand.

SAS Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions deliver a critical advantage to companies by helping them turn data into knowledge, enabling companies to develop unique demand, supply, operational, and customer insights. As a result, companies improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall supply chain, thus maximising their own profits at optimal levels of customer satisfaction.

SAS Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions enable you to:

• Generate insights you can act on.
• Anticipate customer demand.
• Derive financial insights across the extended supply chain.
• Improve product quality, yield, and time to market.
• Optimise supply strategies.
• Leverage existing IT investments.

The SAS Supply Chain Intelligence suite

As a suite of modular, targeted solutions that leverage existing investments in operational/transactional systems, SAS Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions provides a holistic view and monitoring capability across the extended supply chain while also delivering analytics-based insights and decision guidance that maximise profits.

SAS Demand Intelligence
Get market-driven planning through accurate demand forecasting and optimal inventory replenishment planning and pricing strategies. This solution is comprised of three integrated components including Demand Planning, Inventory Replenishment Planning and Price Optimisation.

SAS Value Chain Analytics
Obtain financial intelligence at the granular level required to make fact-based decisions for reducing costs and improving profitability throughout the entire delivery process, including looking outside one's own operation in order to achieve maximum benefits.

SAS Process Intelligence
Exploit integrated data and problem solving, monitoring, control, and improvement actions that align with value creation across your enterprise, all from a single, integrated vantage point, resulting in reduced cycle times and time-to-market, increased product quality and throughput, as well as better asset utilisation.

SAS Supplier Relationship Management
Collect, analyse and leverage all aspects of your supplier data and purchasing history, optimising your strategic sourcing and achieving significant cost savings. This comprehensive, integrated solution helps you achieve substantial returns through three main areas of procurement: strategy alignment and scorecarding, opportunity exploration and detailed spend analysis with decision support.

SAS Warranty Analysis
Reduce warranty costs and improve quality by leveraging warranty claims, call center and other data sources to identify fraudulent claims, detect emerging issues, focus problem-solvers and forecast warranty costs.

SAS Intelligence Platform
A scalable, extensible, robust environment that provides the foundation for creating enterprise intelligence in the overall supply chain.

If you would like to know more about Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions, follow the links on right or contact us direct.