Demand Driven MRP

Variability will always be there in our reality: unexpected events will continue to happen. Suppliers face issues, customers can change their minds, and delays will always accumulate. By placing decoupling stock buffers at strategic positions in your product structure with Demand Driven MRP, you can create independence between steps in the supply chain, reducing the variability and its effects by planning in shorter horizons. Make your inventory and supply planning easier and simpler.

With DDMRP, you will have clear visibility into whether you are using your inventory to its maximum potential—that is, using it as an asset to drive up ROI. In DDMRP, everybody in your company will easily recognize when you have too little inventory, risking not meeting customer demand, or too much, with cash and space tied up in non-useful inventory. Simple and easy to follow, everybody will push towards the same goal.

Easily exclude specific movements from the calculation of required inventory levels for a product. This can be based on criteria such as locations, specific stock moves, or sales order lines. By filtering out exceptional or irregular movements, you can ensure that inventory levels remain accurate and unaffected by atypical activity.

DDMRP stock buffers automatically adjust their size based on future expected demand. Forget about static, one-time-set values in reordering rules or safety stock in conventional planning.

The system securely logs all modifications made to the DDMRP replenishment system configurations. This ensures managers have a complete audit trail, including details of what changes were made, when they were made, and by whom. This transparency helps maintain control, accountability, and traceability in system adjustments.

The system allows you to account for various contractual requirements when optimizing your inventory levels. You can configure parameters such as minimum reorder quantities and minimum order cycles, which are often set by suppliers. By integrating these real-world constraints, the system ensures that inventory levels are optimized according to the specific conditions of your operations.

Safeguard your service levels and minimize stockouts, even under discontinuous demand conditions. Achieve this by introducing a dynamic factor into safety stock calculations and the order spike horizon. This factor is based on the average frequency of demand, ensuring that your inventory strategy adapts to fluctuations while maintaining optimal stock levels.

ForgeFlow Cloud’s DDMRP integrates effortlessly with subcontracting features, ensuring accurate inventory planning in outsourced manufacturing scenarios.

• Components Shipped for Manufacturing
  When manufacturing is subcontracted, the system considers:
  • The shipping time for sub-components to the subcontractor.
  • The lead time for non-stocked components.
  • The subcontractor's manufacturing time.
  • The shipping time for the finished product back to your location.
• Components Pre-stocked at the Subcontractor
  If components are regularly sent to and stored at the subcontractor, inventory calculations consider only:
  • The subcontractor's manufacturing time.
  • The shipping time for the finished product back to your location.

This comprehensive approach ensures precise stock calculations, improving efficiency and maintaining flow in your supply chain.

Enable dynamic adjustments to inventory levels to prepare for planned or anticipated events. These adjustments can be applied in two key areas:

Lead Time: Modify the lead time for individual parts or groups of parts (e.g., similar products or those linked to the same supplier) to account for planned or expected changes, such as extended lead times during specific periods.

Demand: Adjust demand projections, which will automatically propagate changes through the Bill of Materials (BoM), ensuring all dependent components are updated accordingly.

This feature ensures more accurate inventory planning, helping you proactively manage variations in supply and demand.

When replacing a product—such as upgrading to a newer version—ForgeFlow Cloud ERP provides a dedicated tool with two flexible options:

Create a New Replenishment System
Set up a fresh replenishment system for the new product without carrying over demand, lead times, or consumption history from the original product.

Replace a Product in an Existing Replenishment System
Swap the old product with its replacement while retaining demand, lead times, and consumption history. This ensures a smooth transition and maintains inventory continuity.

By using the Net Flow Position (NFP), a unique trait of the DDMRP methodology, you will be able to drive order generation with actual sales orders. No more MPS forecasts forcing you to build and accumulate stock at a different rate from what the market really wants.

Stay informed with warnings about stock settings based on various criteria. By default, the system includes warnings for common misconfigurations, such as zero demand forecasts or future peak control periods shorter than the decoupled lead time. In addition, you can create customized warnings tailored to your specific environment to help you avoid potential problems caused by mistakes and oversights.

Assisted by the system you will be able to generate the most efficient resupply orders in terms of demand coverage while also being restricted by different group constraints like filling trucks, reaching minimum order amounts, respecting transportation units, weight, volume, etc. Learn more.

The system changes the paradigm of prioritization and shifts the focus to protecting the flow of relevant materials instead of focusing on deadlines. For example, production orders are sorted by Net Flow Position (NFP) by default. It also displays the execution priority in the work orders and the planning priority in production orders, promoting the protection of flow in your organization.

Easily configure the following calendars to enhance stock management:

Procurement Calendar: Restricts recommended procurement to specific days, ensuring alignment with internal planning schedules.

Reception Calendar: Adjusts recommended dates to schedule stock receptions in accordance with this calendar, improving operational efficiency.

Supplier Calendar: For purchased items, uses the main supplier’s calendar to align procurement with the supplier's availability and lead times.

These calendars provide flexibility and precision in managing stock buffers while ensuring processes adhere to operational constraints.

Stay on top of your inventory and supply chain with various execution alerts:

Projected On-Hand Alerts: Monitor actual inventory levels and receive warnings when stock levels are at risk of running out, ensuring you avoid stockouts.

Material Synchronization Alerts: Be notified when an identified delay in the receipt of a component makes a production order impossible to fulfill in its entirety, allowing you to address problems before production is affected.

Lead Time Alerts: Track key items that are not in stock but could disrupt the supply chain if their lead times are delayed, helping you to proactively manage critical supplies.

These alerts help ensure your operations run smoothly and reduce the risk of disruptions in your supply chain.

Leverage the Parts Flow Index Report to measure the velocity of parts for which inventory is held. This tool compares order frequencies across multiple products to evaluate how quickly materials and products move through the supply chain, supported by strategically placed inventory.

Products with a high number of days between reorder events indicate excess inventory that is no longer contributing to flow protection and is instead becoming a liability to the organization. Use this report to identify and address inefficiencies, ensuring inventory aligns with operational needs.

Maintain a comprehensive record of buffer history, giving inventory managers access to detailed DDMRP historical data. This includes the evolution of inventory levels and their alignment with demand. Additionally, view historical trend charts for any product's inventory position, from both planning and execution perspectives. This feature enables in-depth analysis and better decision-making based on past performance.

Leverage powerful, insightful reports to optimize your company's processes and measure the effectiveness of inventory management:

Excess Inventory Report by Planner: Evaluate how effectively managers control excess stock and track the evolution of the cost of held inventory over time.

Supplier Disruption Report: Identify suppliers who have been unresponsive, impacting your ability to maintain service levels.

Planner Accuracy Report: Assess how well inventory managers maintain optimal stock levels and manage replenishment processes.

On-Hand Position Distribution Report: Analyze how well stock levels are maintained, ensuring on-hand inventory stays within the target range and is aligned with demand.

Vendor Lead Time Review Report: Compare the assigned lead time in buffers with the actual lead times observed.

These reports provide actionable insights to drive better decision-making and operational efficiency.

Unlock powerful insights to improve your medium- and long-term decision-making. Whether you're exploring the impact of a 30% increase in demand, planning promotions for a product family, or testing changes to your supply chain, this tool empowers you to answer critical "what-if" questions (e.g., Do I need a new warehouse? Should I subcontract production? Do I have sufficient cash flow to support the required inventory for an increase in demand? Will I need additional resources?)

With this feature, you can simulate the behavior of a product or an entire Bill of Materials (BoM) over a defined period in different scenarios. By providing key inputs from your current state such as BoM details, initial stock quantities, inventory movements, and MRP parameters, you can analyze outcomes like purchase orders, manufacturing orders, stock-on-hand evolution, and key performance results.

Track and manage service levels for each stocked part with ease. Access both current and historical service level data to evaluate performance over time and ensure inventory efficiency aligns with your operational goals.