Sells discount school supplies and teaching products to the educational market. With over 80,000 products they supply brand names such as 3M, Post-It, Fiskars, Crayola, etc.
Implemented Products: Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning, Oracle eBusiness Suite 11i10
School Specialty improves Supply Chain performance with Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning
School Specialty, Inc., an educational institution supply company, provides supplemental educational products and equipment for the pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade market in the United States and Canada. The company operates in two segments, Educational Resources Group and Accelerated Learning Group.
Challenges
- Needed the ability to plan and schedule 300,000 – 500,000 Sales order lines per day
- Needed to consolidate and provide supply chain visibility across supply chain and to eliminate manual and offline processes.
- Needed to provide solution for unique forecast consumption and expiration requirements
- Move to integrated R12 ASCP/3rd-party forecasting with no changes to forecasting module processing or interfaces, while changing from monthly to daily/weekly planning buckets
- Providing visibility to information not natively supplied in MRP user interface to support decision-making
Solution
- Implemented a structured planning process based on Oracle Advanced Supply Chain Planning, leveraging standard features including time fence controls and extensive use of exception information.
- Leveraged standard features to present extended planned order cost in Supply/Demand screen
- Developed custom solution for unique forecast expiration requirements, involving a trailing window of a variable number of days of past due forecast to include as demand.
Value Achieved
- Through tightening of supply planning processes, reduced overall inventory investment while improving fill rate to customer orders.
- Reduced planning processing time from >16 hours to under 5 hours
