Product Tour—Oracle Replenishment Planning
Replenishment planning
Oracle Fusion Cloud Demand Management’s new replenishment planning features help ensure inventory availability for stores, depots, stockrooms, and other downstream locations.
Demand-driven planning
An effective replenishment plan starts with an accurate demand forecast. Since replenishment planning is part of Oracle Demand Management, you have the capabilities of a world-class demand planning solution at your service. You can easily manage new item launches, low-volume products, seasonality, and one-time events. Here we can see shipments forecast compared with the shipment history for various segments.
Manage by segment
Demand patterns and inventory objectives can vary widely among replenishment locations. Using Oracle's replenishment planning features, you can divide your business into dynamic, rule-based segments with independent policies. For example, you can define segments based on cost, volume, volatility, and many other attributes. Here we set up segments for low-, medium-, and high-cost items.
Monitor performance
When you run a plan, you can see the effectiveness of your replenishment planning segments at a glance. You can compare stockouts, fill rates, and costs to decide which ones need to be adjusted.
Prioritize issues
It’s essential to quickly identify the specific items and locations that are performing poorly. Here we display the fill rate shortfall percentages in decreasing order. This enables us to review the fill rate shortfall percentages for low-cost, high-volume items in the FE:510 facility, for example. We can click on any one and drill down to a workbench to address the issue.
Simulate solutions
The replenishment planning workbench gives you a time-phased view of demand, supply, and planned replenishments along with min-max inventory and safety stock thresholds. In this case, the maximum inventory threshold is too low to deal with an upcoming demand spike at the FE:510 facility, triggering potential stockouts on 1/10 and 1/24.
Adjust plans
You can override policy parameters, adjust the demand forecast, and edit replenishment quantities to address one-time issues.
Review simulation results
You get immediate feedback on your changes. In this case, revising the min-max thresholds solved the stockout problem.
Release supply to execution systems
When you're satisfied with the results, you can review and release the planned replenishment orders.
Compare before and after results
By simulating replenishment planning over a long time period, you can project your inventory investment, evaluate service level goals, and compare the impact of different policy parameters. Here we can see that by resolving the stockout violations in a high-cost, high-volume segment, we have increased the projected fill rate and also the total inventory investment.
Automate the process
Once you've put the right policies in place, you may be able to replenish many products and locations in “lights-out” fashion. Automated replenishment calculates requirements and releases planned orders whenever inventory positions are updated. Exception summaries highlight any issues. Here we can see that 15 item locations have shortages, which we can drill down into and address by segment if needed.
Review inventory policy effectiveness
You can review the effectiveness of your active replenishment policies in view of your current business conditions. Here the newly calculated policies are automatically accepted if they are within the defined thresholds. If the policy values are outside the defined thresholds, you can perform a policy review to accept, retain, or manually override the new policy values.
Rebalance inventory within a group of locations
Due to variations in demand and supply, some facilities end up having excess inventory while others end up with a shortage. Excess inventory leads to an increase in holding costs while shortages lead to lost sales. In such scenarios, we can benefit by moving inventory from nearby facilities with an excess to facilities with a shortage to minimize the inventory cost incurred by procuring materials from upstream facilities or suppliers.
Integrated from end to end
Replenishment planning features are preintegrated with Oracle Fusion Cloud Inventory Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement so you can get up and running quickly. Simple integration interfaces are available to connect with on-premises systems as well.
Take the next step
With its dynamic segmentation, policy-based management, visual analytics, and interactive problem-solving, Oracle's replenishment planning in the cloud enhances availability while reducing inventory and administration costs. Take advantage of this new Oracle Fusion Cloud Demand Management capability to extend your inventory planning to all your downstream locations.