Collaborative Planning, Forecasting And Replenishment Research Articles

Supply Chain Collaboration:: Making Sense of the Strategy Continuum

Collaboration in the supply chain has been widely discussed, and a wealth of concepts is at hand. Large-scale projects like the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) in the fast moving consumer goods sector, for example, or Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) initiatives more generally provide a rich continuum of strategies for collaborating amongst supply chain partners. While individual successful implementations of the latter have already been reported, there has not yet been the widespread adoption that was originally hoped for. In our research, we looked at implementations across several industries and countries, and our findings show that the slow progress to date may be due to a lack of common understanding of these concepts, and the difficulty of integrating external collaboration with internal production and inventory control. In this paper, we set out to classify collaboration initiatives using a conceptual water-tank analogy, and discuss their dynamic behavior and key characteristics. We draw upon case studies from both successful and less successful implementations to illustrate what companies need to do to fully benefit from their collaborative efforts, given their particular circumstances. We conclude that the effectiveness of supply chain collaboration relies upon two factors: the level to which it integrates internal and external operations, and the level to which the efforts are aligned to the supply chain settings in terms of the geographical dispersion, the demand pattern, and the product characteristics.

DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURER-RETAILER RELATIONSHIPS THROUGH COLLABORATIVE MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY

Nowadays enterprises are facing many challenges such as global competition and thin profits. Consequently, enterprises have changed their focus from cost reduction and quality improvement to quick customer response and innovative services. In recent decades, enterprises have developed advanced industry initiatives to improve efficiency by supply chain management. Effective supply chain management is not achievable by any single enterprise, but instead requires a virtual entity of integrated supply chain partners. They have the insightful commitment of real-time information sharing and collaborative management. Under such a circumstance, an initiative of collaborative management, Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR), has recently been developed and implemented in the industry. In this paper, a case study of CPFR implementation in Rexon, Taiwan is conducted to provide a reference to other enterprises. Rexon's primary purpose of implementing CPFR is to strengthen its retail partnership, improve the accuracy of demand forecasts, and reduce inventory cost and other related operational costs.

Managing business processes across supply networks: the role of coordination mechanisms

The theory of network coordination provides a theoretical basis to explain how companies can overcome organizational boundaries and constraints to jointly manage business processes across supply networks. In particular, this paper focuses on Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), a collaboration process whereby supply chain trading partners activate inter-firm coordination mechanisms to jointly plan key supply chain activities, from production and delivery of raw materials to production and delivery of final products to end customers. By discussing three case studies of CPFR implementation in supply networks of different industries–i.e. pharmaceutical, automotive and mechanical–the paper provides a theoretical framework that contributes to explaining the relations between inter-firm coordination mechanisms and the characteristics of interdependence among the actors involved in CPFR implementation.

Collaborative forecasting: a selection of practical approaches

The Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) process model developed by the Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Standards (VICS) association has received significant attention from both practitioners and academics. However, despite promising pilots, the adoption rate of CPFR has been slower than expected, especially in Europe. The reason seems to be that the proposed collaboration process is currently too labour-intensive for many companies. There is a need for streamlined approaches to get collaboration started in Europe. This paper presents a case study involving a supplier and a retailer collaborating to increase the retailer's forecasting accuracy for new product introductions. The approach is based on creating one forecast that is then shared within the supply chain. Three other streamlined approaches to planning and forecasting collaboration are also presented on a more general level. Finally, there is a discussion as to how the product life cycle model can be used to select and combine the most suitable approaches to collaboration in different market situations.

Supply chain collaboration

Presents a theoretical framework for analysing interorganizational collaboration. Argues that Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) should be viewed as a general approach to coordination of processes between participants in a supply chain, rather than following a slavish step‐by‐step model, as suggested by the organization Voluntary Inter‐Industry Commerce Standards (VICS). This approach demands a deeper analysis of both integration depth and scope of various collaboration forms. This is done primarily from a theoretical perspective, but supported by an empirical study of Danish companies’ attitudes towards interorganizational collaboration.

Assessing the impact of e-business on supply chain dynamics

The Internet and related information and communication technologies (ICT) have recently enabled the cost-effective dissemination of information between disparate parties in the supply chain. New supply chain strategies, such as vendor managed inventory (VMI), collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) and efficient consumer response (ECR), have begun to exploit these new communication channels, principally at the retail end of the supply chain. The impact of the e-business enabled supply chain on manufacturers and materials/component suppliers is, however, less well understood and exploited. This paper is aimed at establishing e-business enabled supply chain models for quantifying the impact of ICT, in particular its effect on dynamic behaviour. The paper concludes that simple, yet robust, models enable considerable quantitative insights into the impact of e-business on supply chain dynamic behaviour prior to their implementation.

CPFR: an emerging supply chain tool

This paper examines collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR), a Web‐based tool to coordinate the various supply chain management activities including production and purchase planning, demand forecasting, and inventory replenishment between supply chain trading partners. This paper identifies what CPFR is, explains the CPFR process, cites benefits that have been achieved, identifies obstacles to implementation, and discusses the future of CPFR.

Collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment: new solutions needed for mass collaboration

The challenge faced by supplier companies in the grocery supply chain for implementing collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) is how to get the retailer to forecast, especially when it has not been necessary before. In this paper a solution that would allow collaboration on a wide scale is presented. The forecasting approach is called “rank and share” and uses input from the retailer’s existing planning process – the category management process. The benefit of using category management as the basis is that the retailer can scale up collaboration with a large number of suppliers without increasing planning resources. For the supplier the benefit is point of sales forecasts at the time of the assortment decision. To support this collaborative forecasting process there is a need for more robust replenishment solutions, new measures to illustrate benefits, and for a distributed planning architecture and software. Potential solutions for these are also discussed in the paper.

Exploring the experiences of collaborative planning initiatives

Supply chain integration (or synchronisation) is to a large extent still only a promise, despite many considerable efforts by organisations and their customers and suppliers. Lack of visibility of true consumer demand and collaborative relationships based upon joint decision making remain significant barriers to the goal of supply chain integration. Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) is a strategy which promises to overcome these barriers, and seeks through joint planning, joint decision making and the development of a clearer understanding of the dynamics of the supply chain replenishment process to deliver some of the promised benefits of actual supply chain integration. Despite the existence of a detailed and comprehensive process model, and promising initial results there has not been widespread adoption of CPFR, justifying the need to revisit the process model and to further explore the inhibitors and enablers. Based upon a review of the existing literature and a comprehensive survey of participants in existing CPFR implementations, this paper identifies the critical inhibitors and makes some proposals as to how these inhibitors may be overcome.