The goal of the comprehensive plan is to meet the demand and maximize the profit. The following is my collection of articles about integrated supply chain planning, hoping to help you!
Comprehensive planning, as its name implies, is a comprehensive decision on the overall situation, not on the level of inventory units.
Therefore, comprehensive planning is an effective tool to think about the decision-making problem in the middle time interval of 3- 18 months. During this period, it is too early to determine the production level by inventory units, but it is too late to establish new production facilities. Therefore, the comprehensive planning answers the question: "How can we make the best use of the existing facilities?"
In order to be more effective, comprehensive planning needs to consider the information of all links in the supply chain, because the results of comprehensive planning have a great impact on the performance of the supply chain. Cooperative forecasting by multiple supply chain enterprises is the main input of comprehensive planning. In addition, many constraints of comprehensive planning come from supply chain partners outside the enterprise. Without these inputs from upstream and downstream, the comprehensive plan can't exert its maximum potential of creating value. The production plan of an enterprise determines the demand of the enterprise for suppliers and the supply constraint of the enterprise for customers.
The main goal of the comprehensive planner is to determine the following operating parameters within a specific time range: productivity, labor, overtime, machine capacity level, subcontracting, delayed delivery demand, existing inventory, etc. A comprehensive plan provides a blueprint for production and operation, provides necessary parameters for making short-term production and distribution decisions, and enables the supply chain to effectively change resource allocation and modify supply contracts. The whole supply chain must participate in this planning process. If the manufacturer plans to increase production within a given time range, suppliers, transporters and warehouses must understand this plan and make corresponding adjustments to their plans. Ideally, all participants in the supply chain will work together to make a comprehensive plan to optimize the performance of the supply chain. If all participants in the supply chain make their own plans independently, it will easily lead to conflicts and lack of coordination between plans, thus resulting in supply shortage or surplus in the supply chain. Therefore, it is very important for all parties involved in the supply chain to make a comprehensive plan as much as possible.
The problem to be solved in comprehensive planning is to determine the appropriate production level, inventory level, production capacity (internal and outsourcing) level and delayed delivery (unsatisfied demand) in each period according to the demand forecast during the planning period, so as to maximize the profit of the enterprise during the planning period. To make a comprehensive plan, the enterprise must determine the planning period of the plan and determine the solution within this time range. Usually, the comprehensive plan adopts month or quarter as the planning time unit. Then, enterprises need to determine the key information needed for comprehensive planning and decision-making (comprehensive planning will provide advice for these decisions). The comprehensive planner needs to know the following information: (1) the forecast value of demand in each period of the planning period; Production costs, including normal labor costs and overtime labor costs, subcontracting production costs, capacity change costs and costs of increasing or decreasing machine capacity; Man-hour/machine-hour required for each unit product; Inventory holding cost; Out-of-stock or delayed delivery costs; Constraints, including overtime restrictions, dismissal restrictions, available funds restrictions, out-of-stock and late delivery restrictions and constraints caused by suppliers. Using this information, enterprises can make the following decisions through comprehensive planning: normal time, overtime time and subcontracting production; Holding inventory; Quantity out of stock or delayed delivery; Number of workers hired/dismissed; An increase/decrease in the production capacity of the machine. The quality of the comprehensive plan will have a great impact on the profitability of enterprises. Unbalanced comprehensive planning may lead to the inability of available inventory and production capacity to meet demand, thus losing sales opportunities and resulting in loss of profits. Therefore, comprehensive planning is a very important tool to help the supply chain maximize profits.
Planners must weigh the cost of capacity, inventory and delayed delivery. When making a comprehensive plan, an increase in one cost usually reduces the other two costs. Because the demand changes with time, the relative level of the three costs inevitably leads to one of the costs becoming the key lever for planners to maximize profits. If the cost of changing production capacity is low, enterprises do not need to build warehouses or delay delivery; If the cost of changing production capacity is high, enterprises can set up warehouses or postpone the delivery of orders in peak season to off-season. In order to achieve the balance between these three costs, three different comprehensive planning strategies can usually be adopted, which involve the trade-off between capital investment, number of employees, working hours, inventory and delayed delivery/sales losses. The three basic strategies are: 1. Catch-up strategy-take the production capacity as the lever, and when the demand level changes, adjust the equipment production capacity or hire or dismiss the labor force to keep the production level in sync with the demand. 2. Time elasticity strategy of labor force or capacity-using the utilization rate as a lever, this strategy is used in the case of excess equipment capacity and flexible labor arrangement. 3. Balance strategy-take inventory as leverage to maintain stable equipment capacity and labor force to balance output. In practice, planners often use mixed strategies to combine the above three methods.
The goal of the comprehensive plan is to meet the demand and maximize the profit. Every enterprise will be subject to certain constraints in the process of trying to meet the demand, such as the capacity of equipment or the delivery capacity of suppliers. When faced with various constraints, an efficient tool to help enterprises maximize profits under a series of constraints is linear programming, which can find ways to meet constraints and create high profits. In order to improve the quality of comprehensive planning, the prediction error must be considered in the calculation process. We use safety stock (that is, the capacity needed to meet the demand higher than forecast) to solve the problem of comprehensive planning error. Enterprises can set up safety stock or safety production capacity in various ways, thus establishing a buffer for forecasting errors. For example, taking overtime as a form of safe production capacity; Use the permanent employment of extra employees as a form of safe production capacity; Regard subcontracting production as a form of safe production capacity; Keep more inventory as a form of safety inventory; Purchase production capacity or products from the open market or the spot market as a form of safe production capacity.
Planners must refine and decompose the information available in the comprehensive plan and make a rough Master Production Plan (MPS) to determine the production batch number of each product series in each period. Although this method is not necessarily optimal, it is simple and feasible, and the feasibility check is considered. If the planner wants a better plan, he can use more complicated methods. However, these methods are difficult to realize and cannot fully reflect the complex reality. Based on the above reasons, we think it is best to use this simple method to make a rough master production plan.
Undoubtedly, comprehensive planning is the most widely used supply chain field of information technology. The earliest IT supply chain products are integrated planning modules, which are usually called factory planning, production planning or manufacturing planning. Some early modules only focused on generating feasible production plans under the constraints of meeting demand and available capacity. The latter module can provide some effective tools to choose the best solution from the feasible production plan according to the goal of increasing output or reducing cost. These classical solutions usually model the comprehensive plan as a linear plan, and then get the production plan of each product. Now considering that not all constraints or reasonable objective functions are linear, some planning modules also include nonlinear optimization. However, because a large number of data need to be considered in the process of making comprehensive plans, and nonlinear functions can be approximated by linearity, linear programming is usually the best way to solve these problems.
Nowadays, the supply chain module usually integrates the functions of production planning and inventory planning, and supply chain planning module takes the output of forecasting module as the constraint condition for establishing production planning and inventory level. The execution system uses these production plans and inventory levels to organize the actual production of products and set the inventory level of the whole supply chain. Because these problems are very complicated, the comprehensive planning module can even bring huge benefits to small companies. It can bring value to the comprehensive plan in the following aspects: the ability to deal with large-scale problems; Ability to deal with complex problems (through nonlinear optimization and linear approximation); Ability to interact with other core IT systems, such as inventory management or procurement. Because the problem of comprehensive planning is so complicated, there is usually no other way to get a feasible solution except it.
In the practice of comprehensive planning, firstly, the scope of thinking extends from a single enterprise to the whole supply chain. Because many factors outside the whole supply chain greatly affect the optimal comprehensive plan, we should avoid thinking only within the enterprise and make predictions with the downstream partners of the supply chain. Using supply chain to improve the quality of input information will greatly improve the quality of comprehensive planning. The second is to make the plan flexible, because the forecast is always inaccurate. Since these forecasts are usually inaccurate to some extent, comprehensive plans need to be flexible in order to be applied in practice. Third, when new data appear, make a comprehensive plan again. When the information input into the comprehensive plan (such as demand plan) changes, managers should use these latest data to analyze and re-formulate the comprehensive plan, so that the comprehensive plan can avoid local optimization only on the basis of the old information, thus producing a better solution. Fourth, when the capacity utilization rate is improved, the comprehensive plan is used. When the capacity utilization rate is high and there is a problem with the capacity, the problem of insufficient capacity will occur if the production plan is arranged according to the order. When the capacity utilization rate is high, it is unlikely that all the ordered products can be produced on time. Therefore, it is very important to implement a comprehensive plan when the capacity utilization rate is improved.
Expansion: Supply Chain Finance Business Plan
At present, under the background of economic globalization, digitalization and network development, the core competition of enterprises has risen from individual to supply chain and even the whole industrial ecological chain. * * * Building a healthy industrial ecology has been recognized by the whole industrial chain and highly recognized by all countries.
China even put forward the grand goal of building the "first echelon" of the global supply chain, and favorable policies followed. Among them, finance has become the main starting point, and it is also the backbone of China's current development of supply chain, rebuilding its advantages as an international trade center, and promoting China enterprises to integrate into the global supply chain system more deeply and widely.
Rapid development of supply chain finance
For the supply chain of developed countries, finance is not only the strongest kinetic energy for the development of industrial chain, but also the best way to get through the upstream and downstream of industrial chain. Since the beginning of the industrial field, American supply chain has paid attention to the promotion of financial forces behind it. At present, supply chain finance has gradually developed from bank-led to the leading stage of industrial core enterprises. According to American experience, the future space of supply chain finance in China will be far greater than the demand of industrial chain reform and the innovative development of financial technology.
In the game process of deepening domestic supply reform, imminent industrial transformation and upgrading, financial repression and prominent financial shortcomings, supply chain finance undoubtedly has broad prospects and great potential. The innovation of supply chain finance is not only reflected in enterprise financing, but more importantly, it integrates the upstream and downstream resources of the industrial chain, produces a synergistic development effect, and enhances the overall strength of the industry. This is not only in line with the development of economic globalization, but also a natural derivative of a mature supply chain.
Undoubtedly, the development of industrial supply chain in the future must realize the integration of "business flow", "capital flow" and "information flow", and supply chain finance is the best way to achieve this goal.
Supply chain finance solves the problem of "capital flow" of small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial chain through the advantages of capital and resources of core enterprises, and enhances the core kinetic energy of enterprise development. Secondly, this cross-border integration and collaborative development service model reshapes the context and nerves of the market economy, opens up the "business flow", "logistics" and information flow between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, and realizes the efficient collaborative ecology of products from design to production and sales services.
Relying on industrial chain management services and modern financial innovation, it is an important task for China to build a high-end industrial cluster system with modern market competitiveness.
The rise of supply chain finance is that it can quickly and effectively solve the problems of separation of industry and finance and financing in traditional supply chain. In the traditional industrial chain, upstream and downstream small and medium-sized enterprises, especially distributors, often face difficulties in capital turnover and loans, which greatly limits their ability to further expand the market. As the core of the industrial chain, large enterprise groups have obvious advantages in market, brand, resources and capital, and provide much-needed financial services for small and medium-sized enterprises in the industrial chain, which is conducive to the coordinated development of the industrial chain and the cake of the industrial chain market.
Giants gather in supply chain finance
Since last year, the giant's efforts in the field of supply chain finance have become increasingly obvious.
Not long ago, Ali released the "code business growth plan" to fully empower small and micro groups of individual industrial and commercial households, including supply chain financial services (credit purchase loans, revolving credit loans, etc.). ) are the top priority.
Tencent's Weizhong Bank strives to build a micro-credit product "micro-loan" based on tax data and social data, and tries to cultivate it into the next phenomenal explosive mutual gold product after "micro-loan".
China Construction Bank has fully implemented the "Double Small" inclusive finance strategy, and constructed a "small micro-quick loan" product system that can adapt to the micro-finance scene. Therefore, Chairman Tian Guoli's recent statement can be so high-profile: "The development of inclusive finance business depends not on good wishes, but on ability."
In addition, Hony Fortune is constantly deepening its own ecological supply chain financial system, developing a unique risk control system, and creating fast and convenient financing services for enterprises. It can be seen that accurately aiming at solving the financial pain points and difficulties of small and micro enterprises has almost become the constant theme and communication strategy of supply chain financial service providers.
Risk control science and technology
At present, China's supply chain finance has entered a new era of smart supply chain finance, which is marked by the comprehensive empowerment of financial technology to the supply chain financial risk control system.
At present, the most important financial technologies include five items: ABCD+I, namely AI artificial intelligence, blockchain blockchain, CloudComputing cloud computing, Big-Data big data, and IOT Internet of Things. Its starting point is as follows:
First, cloud computing is the foundation. Cloud computing technology can greatly reduce the data operation cost of various market entities and facilitate the cloud platform to collect aggregated data, which is the premise of big data technology.
Second, big data technology is the key. In the scenario of supply chain finance, based on the analysis of big data, we can review the qualifications of core enterprises and evaluate the repayment ability, thus improving the loan financing speed and realizing the risk balance within the supply chain system.
Third, the Internet of Things technology is a useful supplement to data sources. For example, through sensing, navigation, positioning and other technical means, the transaction process is controlled in the warehousing and freight links to improve the authenticity of terminal transactions. Through the Internet of Things platform, we can open up financing and resource demand, realize the high integration of modern logistics and current information systems, and form information sharing.
The fourth is the wide application of artificial intelligence technology. In the future, in the field of supply chain finance, the Internet of Things such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, in-depth analysis and loading sensors can be used to further enrich the dynamic data lake, automatically update customers' portraits on a regular basis, and actively increase credit lines for quality customers.
The fifth is the deep embedding of blockchain technology. Supply chain finance needs multi-party cooperation, and the data comes from many aspects. Blockchain can be used to build scenes. Use the characteristics of blockchain, such as distributed storage, open and transparent data, tamper-proof, identity security, etc., to create a trust environment.
In the structure of supply chain finance, three subjects are the most important:
Platform service providers, risk managers and liquidity providers. The core of finance is always to identify risks and make risk pricing, so whoever can become the core risk manager can dominate the smart supply chain financial system.
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