Optimize your Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)

A central task of supply chain management is also to coordinate complex, long-running projects as well as possible across several departments with project planning and project management. Comprehensive planning thus includes all relevant value-creating processes, from development to sales. An essential success factor for efficient supply chain management is the continuous monitoring of supply chain performance with a suitable KPI system and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) tool.

The handling of the planning tasks should be reflected in order to keep planners up-to-date at all times and enable optimal production control. For this, reports are provided from the shop floor via suitable production control systems or manufacturing execution systems (MES) or information is read in from plant data collection. The efficient and fast communication of planning system and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is an essential guarantee of the great transparency and up-to-dateness of planning and master data.

waySuite supports the planning situations described thanks to integrative software modules with a high-performance interface between ERP system and the waySuite planning tool.

You can learn more here about how waySuite is structured, what the individual modules and components include, how they work together, and what the benefits of this software are for your integrated company planning.

waySuite offers companies the opportunity to handle the entire sales & operations planning (S&OP) process in real time. Thanks to waySuite’s real-time capability, users can coordinate sales plans, production capacities, and raw material with one another very efficiently across all planning horizons. From automatic sales plan forecasts to fine production planning on through to real-time availability checks in Realtime, the waySuite enables complete integration of all planning levels in one tool.

The people in charge of production and supply chain management (SCM) focus on upcoming operative planning tasks every day. These include operative procurement and disposition, production planning, and the scheduling of new customer orders. Here, many decisions have to be made each day, so it’s important to keep an eye on the short-term planning horizon as well.

Within sales & operations planning (S&OP), the people in charge plan once a month or sometimes for a longer period of time. On the one hand, this affects demand planning, with which the best possible forecasts of future sales are identified. In a second step, APS realtime tool wayRTS checks the feasibility of these sales figures and orients the entire supply chain according to them. Based on this information, strategic decisions can be made for long-term production planning and control:

Another central task of supply chain management is project planning, including project management of complex and long-running projects in order to coordinate all involved departments as well as possible. Comprehensive planning thus includes all relevant value-creating processes, from development to sales. An essential success factor for efficient S&OP or advanced planning & scheduling system (APS) such as valantic’s waySuite is the continuous monitoring of supply chain performance through a suitable KPI system and key performance indicator (KPI) tool.

The planning results should be reflected in real time in order to provide the people in charge with the best possible information at all times and guarantee optimal production control.

The efficient and fast communication of planning system and ERP/SAP systems is an essential guarantee of the great transparency and up-to-dateness of planning and master data. waySuite supports the planning situations described thanks to integrative software modules with a standardized interface between the ERP/SAP system and waySuite. This is how waySuite helps users with all planning tasks along the company’s supply chain.

Benefits for your processes

The advanced planning & scheduling (APS) software wayRTS (Real Time Simulation) is high-performance software for production planning and control in real time of all a company’s value-creation levels. wayRTS makes planning transparent and gives users the opportunity to undertake easy interventions with planning support that can be automated at will.

Thanks to the flexible, main memory-based data structure, wayRTS enables the modeling of production processes and seamless integration and synchronization of other value-creating processes, for example in the pre-production phase (design, planning, work preparation, etc.). And all this in real time.

There is always optimization potential in production planning, and in conjunction with this also in demand or procurement planning and in S&OP. waySuite enables you to recognize and exploit this potential. You can use waySuite to reduce throughput times, inventories, and set-up times, and also to reduce the effort required for planning. AI handles the routine tasks.
You should not have to deal with processing missing parts or backorders: waySuite automatically resolves conflicts with its intelligent algorithms. By automating regular planning tasks, you can focus on clarifying specific planning situations.

Benefits for your processes

Individual customer requests should also be fulfilled in complex projects; that’s the goal and nevertheless always a challenge. To achieve this, the various basic conditions, including delivery dates, resource planning, and operative project management have to be perfectly attuned to one another. With valantic’s wayPRO software module, you get easy, quick mapping of this multi-project planning.

All projects are saved centrally in wayPRO, processed in real time, and thus available to all planners at any time. If different projects access the same resources, wayPRO reveals dependencies and identifies scheduling and capacity conflicts. Project managers can therefore concentrate on their essential work, plan projects realistically, prioritize decisions, and reveal alternatives for action.

In project management and especially in production planning, the right allocation of resources and capacities can cause projects to succeed or fail. Employees are another important, special resource. Employees cannot simply be planned in at will. Different qualifications, work time models, overtime accounts, labor law requirements, vacation planning, trainings, sick days, and much more make the allocation of personnel capacities complex. At the same time, agile, order-oriented production requires flexible deployment of personnel.

valantic’s modern workforce management solution way WFM helps users plan personnel deployment efficiently and clearly. Incorporated into waySuite, wayWFM offers extensive workforce management functionalities for automatic, optimized assignment of personnel resources taking into account demand, qualifications, and capacities.

With the business intelligence tool wayKPI, companies get an overall view of the performance of their whole supply chain with company-specific KPIs. wayKPI offers all tools required for creating, visualizing, analyzing, and reporting KPIs. With KPI cockpits, users can get an overview of their KPIs and their development at any time on any end user device. They can use KPI dashboards to analyze their KPIs and data down to the individual document and from every point of view. Reports can be configured according to their wishes and specifications. wayKPI’s report generator handles the regular updating and distribution of the reports.

The direct connection to wayRTS with pre-configured KPIs quickly ensures sufficient transparency with regard to the degree of implementation of the planning results in the relevant departments.

With wayCOM, companies not only digitalize their workflows, they also increase efficiency by standardizing and automating the accompanying communication. With wayCOM, users specify which information should flow where and which documentation is created for this. Users define very flexibly which business events trigger which automatic measures. This way, errors and omissions in the operational information flow can be prevented and the transparency of processes increases – automatically, without any additional effort.

wayDDO (Demand & Dispo Optimization) is the forecasting and dispo data tool of the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) software waySuite from valantic. wayDDO enables the forecasting of future demands and automation of the dispo data management through a high performing mathematical algorithm. The software includes a variety of predefined parameters and can be adapted to individual customer requirements. By using wayDDO, costs in procurement and production can be reduced, procurement and disposition planning can be optimized and a higher degree of automation can be achieved.

wayDDO uses state-of-the-art procedures to meet the different requirements of the companies. For short-term forecasts, forecasts of spontaneous demand or the identification of longer-term trends, different algorithms are optimally suited in each case. The selection of the optimal procedure is automated. Alternatively, the selection can also be done in an uncomplicated way by the decision maker and dispatcher.