Kinaxis® enhances the power of concurrent planning with its data visualisation and analysis capabilities.

More than ever before, everyone in the supply chain, from executives to planners, can easily solve complex planning problems. Even in environments with increasing volatility due to regulation changes, stock-keeping unit (SKU) proliferation and growing consumer expectations, executives and planners know they have the right information to make the best decisions to maximize business performance.

The latest Kinaxis innovations let executives and planners make confident decisions easily by:

  • Gaining instant visibility into their supply chain’s health anywhere from any device with the new mobile-first application, Live Lens
  • Identifying supply chain hotspots and seeing, understanding and acting quickly when changes to parts, processes or suppliers impact bills of material (BOM) with new easy-to-grasp BOM and network visualisations
  • Discovering insights and uncovering issues with the flexibility to explore data with new personalised reporting and visualisation tools

Failing to make the right decision at the right time can have dire consequences to the bottom line. Cumbersome, silo-based systems cannot provide the flexibility needed and prevent enterprises from being agile in their decision-making, leading to higher costs, lower customer satisfaction and declining revenue.

Kinaxis delivers a modern alternative to unify planning teams and extend the value of investments in transaction-oriented enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP) such as SAP and Oracle. Kinaxis does this by bringing an enterprise’s data, processes and people together on a single digital platform for integrated supply chain planning, monitoring and response.

CEO of Kinaxi John Sicard said: “Successfully managing your supply chain requires making countless decisions daily, but the reality for most people is that the choices they are making are based on outdated and incomplete information, and without the necessary understanding of how their choices might negatively impact other parts of the business.

“Our recent innovations provide instant end-to-end visibility of how decisions affect your supply chain and the people who run them. Gone are the days of working with fog between each supply chain function, and gone are the days of guessing the right course of action. Confidence is restored when everyone is aligned, everyone is working from the same truth and no one works alone.”

These new capabilities, underpinned by the unique Kinaxis concurrent planning technique, help customers further collapse the time it takes to make decisions. Concurrent planning instantly and continuously balances all aspects of the end-to-end supply chain, so when a planner in one area makes a change, everyone else across the supply chain immediately sees the impact.

Director of research at Nucleus Research Seth Lippincott said: “One of the biggest hurdles customers face is closing the gap between supply chain planning and execution.

“With these new and enhanced capabilities, Kinaxis is taking the right steps to connect every person along the supply chain network ensuring they have access to the same, up-to-date data that can be used to make more insightful business decisions.”

Designed with on-the-go team members in mind, Live Lens lets anyone, anywhere, from any device see the most critical areas of the supply chain and get an at-a-glance view into how the company is measuring up against key corporate metrics related to their roles, like revenue and gross margin.

Director of advanced planning at Jabil Lizet Tymon said: “Kinaxis has fundamentally changed how we plan.

“We’re now able to manage and understand huge amounts of data and complexity easily. As a result, we’ve transformed our sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes to effectively collaborate with customers, evaluate financial trade-offs and make confident business decisions.”

With new BOM and network visualisation capabilities, users can identify supply chain hotspots and see, understand and act quickly when changes to parts, processes or suppliers arise. Planners can instantly recognise potential substitution options, the co-products and by-products that are involved, and detailed material requirements for improved planning, costing and overall supply chain performance.

New personalised reports and dashboards provide an intuitive and responsive view of data allowing users to discover insights and uncover issues and opportunities. Through drag and drop capabilities, users can reshape their planning experience for ease of use and greater productivity.

Inventory analyst at Teradyne John Leo said: “Inventory analysis can be challenging, but with Kinaxis I now actually really enjoy it.

“With so many ways to look at the data and make my decision, Kinaxis makes our entire analysis process easier, helps me in my day-to-day role, and lets me give complete, accurate results to management quickly. I couldn’t imagine not using Kinaxis.”

These new capabilities are available on the Kinaxis RapidResponse® platform, a Cloud-based solution that gives planners visibility across the complete supply chain in seconds, flexibility with intuitive and responsive reporting, and agility to respond to change faster. Customers using RapidResponse can cut planning cycles in half and make collaboration decisions 100x faster than traditional, siloed techniques.