When students at Segerstrom High School in California attend calculus class, they’ve already learned the day’s lesson beforehand — having watched it on a short online video prepared by their teacher, the night before.
So without a lecture delivered by a teacher, students spend class time doing practice problems in small groups, taking snap quizzes, explaining concepts to the class, and sometimes making their own videos while the teacher moves from student to student to help kids who are having problems.
It’s a new form of learning called Flip – because the idea has flipped traditional education on its head – homework is for the lecture, while the classroom, traditionally reserved for the lecture, is for practice and deeper learning and collaboration.
Flipped learning is catching on in a number of schools across North America, as a younger, more tech-savvy student population – including teachers – now make up the typical classroom.
When it comes to supply chain planning, the concept of flipping applies nicely and most people, and most companies, could benefit greatly by flipping their thinking.
Let’s take CPG manufacturers. When it comes to demand planning, they have it difficult. Trying to forecast what their retail and other customers are going to do and want is difficult and it’s not getting any easier. The empowered consumer, changing and dynamic retailer-led strategies are just two examples of shifts that are making it almost impossible to predict the demand, with any level of reasonableness. The result? Additional inventory and buffer stock required to respond, “just in case”.
There are a number of studies that prove this point. Forecast accuracy has not improved and, in most cases, it’s getting worse.
Supply chain practitioners and experts are responding in the typical fashion. We need better algorithms, fancier formulas, maybe even artificial intelligence and some big data sprinkled on top in order to find a better forecasting engine.
Sorry folks, that’s not working and as consumers and customers become more demanding and expectations rise, it’s going to get worse. What’s needed is to flip the thinking and to change the paradigm.
CPG manufacturers, for the most part, are forecasting what should be calculated. The demand plan they are trying to predict for their customer, should be provided to them in the form of a supplier schedule. And that schedule should reflect the latest knowledge about the consumer, and any and all associated strategies and tactics that will entice the consumer’s buying patterns and/or product flows.
Forecasting consumer demand is, as has been proven, simpler and easier that trying to predict dependent demand – that is, the resulting demand on DC’s and plants based on ordering rules, lead times, and other constraints that tend to “pollute” the dependent demand plan.
When it comes to demand planning, Joe Orlicky had it right some 40 years ago: you should never forecast what can be calculated.
Of course, what we’re talking about is a retailer using the Flowcasting process to plan all flows from supplier to consumer – factoring in any and all constraints that translate the consumer forecast into the purchase projection from retailer to supplier.
Why is this so much better than the traditional approaches? First, the entire retail supply chain (or any industrial supply chain) is driven by only one forecast – consumer demand. All other demands can and should be calculated. The effect is to dramatically simplify planning. The retailer and manufacturer are working to a single, shared forecast of what’s expected to sell.
Second, the entire supply chain can be re-planned quickly and effortlessly – making the supply chain agile and dynamic. Changes are and can be viewed almost in real-time and the changes are automatically translated for all partners in the supply chain – in units, cube, weight, dollars, capacity or any language needed throughout the supply chain. The result is that the entire supply chain is working to a single set of numbers.
Third, when you embrace the idea of Flowcasting as it relates to planning, you get so much more than a better forecast. Unlike traditional approaches that are trying to mathematically predict the demand, the supplier schedules that are a resultant of the Flowcasting process, calculate the demand by aggregating product flows.
Therefore, trading partners can see, well into the future, projected product flows between any two locations and this provides tremendous insight and flexibility to improve and smooth flows, as well as proactively put in place solutions to potential flow issues before they happen. The retailer and manufacturer can actually work, using the same system and process, as if they were one company – all oriented to delight and deliver to the consumer, in the most profitable manner possible.
Finally, in addition to providing product flows the approach also produces projections of sales, inventory, purchases, receipts and, as mentioned, flows in any language of the business – units, cube, weight and capacities for operations folks and dollars for financial folks and Management in order to get better control of the business and ensure that plans stay on track.
If you’re planning the retail supply chain, you get so much more when you forecast less.
So, what is the path forward for manufacturers?
They need to flip their thinking and understand that they are trying to forecast what should be calculated – and that this practice will soon be obsolete.
Next, they should engage and work with their key retail and other customers to help educate their customers that a process like Flowcasting not only helps them (in the form of a supplier schedule and complete visibility), it provides even more value to the retail customer. In fact, to date, it’s the only planning approach that consistently delivers in-stock levels of 98%+, even during promotions – crushing the industry averages of around 92%.
Once they are successful, a CPG manufacturer, over time, can be working with their top retail customers and receiving valid, up-to-date, supplier schedules that in most companies account for 70-85% of their volume. The additional demands can then be forecasted using the latest approaches – demand sensing, etc.
Imagine, for a moment, what that would mean to the retail industry and the CPG manufacturers in general. The impact would be enormous – from increased sales and profits, to significant reductions in inventory and working capital. Not to mention the impact to consumers and customer loyalty.
Is all this possible?
Sure, but to make it happen the first step is to flip your thinking.