8 | | DECEMBER 2021IN MY OPINIONBy Olivier Jonard, Supply Chain and Logistics Director, AGROMOUSQUETAIRESAs long as I can remember working in Supply Chain, BI tools have been my best friends. Without them, impossible to perform specific analysis on new issues, add a KPI, special report to the Directors etc. Actually, in all the industrial companies I have been working for, we were dependent on BI to run daily operations. Why is that? I have 2 examples in mind. 1. For one warehouse in charge of preparing thousands of orders per day, we were given precise instructions by the VP of merchandising to manage product shortages (particularly during product launches), taking into account country, margins, store size, store ownership. There was absolutely no way we could execute that in the WMS without making mistakes. So, with the sharp minds in the team we had to develop an algorithm to extract orders lines from the ERP where they were placed, download them in PowerQuery, apply the priority rules we were given before re-injecting them in the WMS. Dangerous? Absolutely. We could have made huge mistakes. However, With this method we were able to execute business priorities in serving our customers and own stores.2. In charge of supplying raw materials for several factories, I didn't want to use standard MRP functions in SAP, generating too many alerts and changes. I decided to use automatic replenishment based on thresholds. And guess what, to set up the thresholds I built an alrogithm in Excel (based on past variability of consumption, delivery lead times, MOQ etc.). And here again, extracting data from SAP into Excel, running the model, tweaking it to adjust the targets, and re-importing it into SAP became a bi-monthly routine. With this I reduced inventory from 9 to 2, 5 months of coverage and never went out of stock. I can remember dozens of situations like this, when the Supply Chain teams had to be smart, and under the radar of IT and finance used BI or desktop tools to significantly Improve Service or inventory levels. It even started in 1993, when I started my career at Renault. Renault was clever enough to have developped a BI environment where production data could be accessed by the SC teams to build reports and KPIs. I realized then that learning SQL could help me tremendously in my work. With the years I learned how to use MS Access, then Pivot tables, then Power Queries, etc and then I was not clever enough and delegated these tasks to our precious BI teams, working with more and more advanced tools.Now start the questions : 1. Why can't we have these queries and optimization possibilities in our APS? APS are done to optimize supply chains, right?2. To whom should the BI team report to? To IT or in Supply Chain?3. Does the rise of Data Science change what I have experienced for more than 25 years ? If yes, in which direction, and who should actually master Data Science techniques ?Here are my tentative answers to these 3 questions1. What about these fancy software? I believe any one who already went through an APS implementation process has seen their limitations. What are those?· Speed : 12 to 18 months is a minimum for implementing an APS. During this time, chances are that your business has changed. The result you get is not covering your new needs, not even sure they were actually covering your initial needs.· Resources : During these 12 to 18 months and of course after implementation is finished, you have to mobilize your most experienced and brightest people. Their tasks were to understand the software, describe the actual process and constraints in a way it can be modeled by the software, extract and clean data, tests, retests, train, understand the limits of the APS VSBI/DATA SCIENCE
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