{"id":3018,"date":"2018-05-11T14:52:03","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T04:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/yinghuiinternational.com\/?p=3018"},"modified":"2018-05-17T14:53:19","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T04:53:19","slug":"a-reinvention-of-sales-production-inventory-forecasts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yinghuiinternational.com\/index.php\/2018\/05\/11\/a-reinvention-of-sales-production-inventory-forecasts\/","title":{"rendered":"A REINVENTION OF SALES, PRODUCTION, INVENTORY FORECASTS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A REINVENTION OF SALES, PRODUCTION, INVENTORY FORECASTS<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
Posted May 11, 2018<\/span>\u00a0|<\/span><\/div>\n
Quarry operations are moving away from messy spreadsheets and rethinking communication, production planning and sales forecasting to save time and improve productivity. One such medium that quarries worldwide are utilising is PlantDemand, a business intelligence tool.<\/span><\/div>\n

The importance of collaboration and real time information sharing in today\u2019s business climate cannot be overstated. It is even more important for quarry operations that are constantly trying to plan and match production levels to sales volumes.<\/p>\n

Plant managers are challenged to maintain optimal quarry cash flow and inventory while preventing plant overbooking and co-ordinating with multiple suppliers for raw materials \u2212 all to schedule on-time deliveries that meet customers\u2019 changing orders.<\/p>\n

This is especially difficult because sales teams don\u2019t often have insight into what materials are available to be produced and sold, and how a new order will affect production. It\u2019s also challenging managers to produce accurate forecasts and get up-to-date information about the plant capacity and actual sales versus forecast sales.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n
The PlantDemand app allows plant managers to create summaries and run default and custom reports against actual sales or forecasts.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Modern business intelligence<\/strong><\/p>\n

The latest report by US Market research company Forrester Research predicts that 2018 will see enterprises refocus on leveraging advanced collaboration and communication tools across the enterprise.<\/p>\n

It also predicts that in the coming years everyone within an organisation will become a data analyst, with the ability to leverage modern business intelligence (BI) tools to quickly sort, prioritise and visualise targeted information that is directly relevant to that individual\u2019s line of responsibility. The hope is that better visual interfaces and real time reporting will actively support collaboration across operational teams and drive better decision-making at every level inside an organisation.<\/p>\n

Not only that, the Millennial generation is expected to represent 50 per cent or more of the overall workforce by the year 2020.2 And collectively, not only are younger generations \u201cdigital natives\u201d, meaning they grew up with technology, but they also value it greatly and see it as a differentiator and a \u201cmust have\u201d for employers.<\/p>\n

\"Each<\/p>\n
Each morning, it is easy to log into PlantDemand \u2013 from the office or remotely \u2013 to be appraised of the day\u2019s deliveries.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

If companies want to hire and retain top talent, they will need to continue to shift towards easy to use cloud-based tools and applications that support productivity and a collaborative environment.<\/p>\n

It is out of this BI-focused landscape that Daniel Mekis began to unravel the communication, production and scheduling problems facing many quarries today. As an assistant plant manager in California, he struggled first hand with planning and scheduling of materials at various quarries, and he felt a lack of collaboration was a major part of the problem.<\/p>\n

His team tried Outlook, Excel and even Microsoft Access and SharePoint solutions to compile sales information and plan and co-ordinate production.<\/p>\n

\u201cBack when I worked as a plant engineer, it was our job to know if we were going to make enough material to meet the demands of our customers,\u201d Mekis said. \u201cEven if you know you\u2019re producing 250,000 tonnes of material throughout the year, the sales quantities change daily, with many orders changing multiple times before they actually ship.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther problems we ran into were plant overbooking, the quarry running out of materials, sourcing materials from multiple suppliers, or using incorrect materials. I used to spend at least three hours for each plant per week compiling sales information to build a forecast report \u2013 which would show materials demand in different time intervals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Real time planning<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"PlantDemand<\/p>\n
PlantDemand can colour-code by material in the sales calendar for better organisation and simplified viewing.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Quarries are beginning to take advantage of new collaborative tools that enable teams to move away from solving a problem on an individual island and move towards initiating well informed discussions between the various branches of an operational team.<\/p>\n

One new approach that stands out is PlantDemand, an online quarry scheduling tool3, not just for planning and forecasting orders and production, but also for identifying issues and solving them before they come up.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlantDemand is a new concept for aggregate operations because it uses collaboration and real time information sharing,\u201d Dennis Schaaf, the director of PlantDemand, said. \u201cIt provides a single source of truth to plan sales, production, material needs and inventory forecasts.<\/p>\n

PlantDemand\u2019s online calendar is described as:<\/p>\n