As the market demands increasing choices, we see massive proliferation of products that are designed and produced to satisfy varying consumer tastes. We also see similar explosion of the types of products produced as various applications and customizations grow.

Most OEMs and other manufacturers tasked with producing these products rely upon a good supplier base to supply the components, sub assemblies, or outsource the entire product. Often the negotiation of price for parts and/or the allocation of the capacities at supplier location are based on aggregate analysis. Companies rarely negotiate capacities with their suppliers at an individual SKU or item level.  It is very typical to see analysis and negotiations being done at a higher level aggregation, some examples are:

• A furniture manufacturer might negotiate price and capacity of a specific type of fabric of large length, say 30,000 feet irrespective of specific color
• A metals procurement company may hone in on 4,000 tons of metal to be bought, although final orders might belong to different shapes and sizes
• A FPGA company may negotiate price and capacity to buy 2,500 semiconductor devices irrespective of the ‘Package type’ or ‘Pin count’

Aggregate Supplier Analysis in Oracle Value Chain Planning Applications

Oracle Value Chain Planning applications are excellent in calculating and presenting requirements at individual item/SKU level. In order to make this information useful for procurement and operations managers, the data must be calculated and presented at an aggregate level.

Inspirage has done extensive work in this area to improve the ease of use by planning organizations. We have further expanded the application capabilities to derive requirements at aggregate level through innovative modeling and a set of reusable application configurations.

For those customers who would like to use the supplier production capacities as constraints, Inspirage offers methodology to a feasible operational plan while considering supplier capacities at aggregate levels.

Inspirage has successfully deployed several solutions using a readily re-usable model that can help a wide variety of companies across several Industry segments such as Consumer Products, Industrial Manufacturing, and High Tech.

It is worthy to note that once the application configurations are implemented, these same planning constructs can be leveraged by literally all Oracle VCP supply planning modules such as ASCP, GOP, RP, and CP. Inspirage has been particularly successful in using this aggregate supplier planning capability with both Oracle ASCP and Rapid Planning products.