Automating Material Planning in Supply Operations – Vanderlande

 Overview

Project Description

Project Description:

Vanderlande’s Global Supply Chain (GSC) organization is critical to delivering products and services worldwide. This global operation is managed through three Supply Chain Centers (SCC) located in Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region. These SCCs oversee all logistic operations, coordinating product and material flow from suppliers to project sites around the globe, in collaboration with Vanderlande’s Global Supply Network (GSN).

Due to the complexity of the supply chain, fluctuating business volumes, and shifting priorities, the material planning process faces numerous challenges. Key tools utilized include JD Edwards (ERP system) and Excel, both of which support the distribution requirements planning (DRP) process. However, daily operations involve a significant amount of manual work as large volumes of DRP messages are released from JD Edwards. This creates inefficiencies for the material planners tasked with balancing supply and demand across different nodes of the supply network.

Currently, the manual nature of the process, exacerbated by the heavy reliance on Excel, results in a lack of oversight and limited capacity to evaluate alternative scenarios. To streamline operations and reduce the workload for planners, potential solutions range from improving the ERP system to leveraging low-code platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a clear roadmap to automating the material planning process is currently lacking, and the end goal remains undefined.

Project Objective:

The objective of this project is to provide a comprehensive overview of the challenges facing material planning in supply operations and to critically evaluate current solution approaches in light of academic research. From this analysis, the project aims to identify the most promising avenues for automating material planning processes.

Project Deliverables:

1. Assessment of the Current Material Planning Operation:
   A detailed analysis of the current material planning process, including the information flow, systems used, and its interaction with other planning operations within the organization.
2. Overview of Common Solution Directions and Technologies:
   A comprehensive overview of solution trends, technologies, and methods utilized in material planning, including an assessment from an academic perspective, to highlight best practices and relevant innovations.
3. Identification of the Most Viable Solution(s):
   Based on the analysis, identify and propose the most viable solution(s) that could improve the efficiency and automation of the material planning processes.

Additional Background Information:

• Vanderlande’s supply operations in Veghel consist of four planning teams: Material Planning in Supply Operations, Sales & Operations Planning, Manufacturing, and Global Spare Parts. Each team employs different tools and operates across varying planning horizons.
• As a highly project-driven organization, Vanderlande follows an Engineering-to-Order (ETO) model, which results in a high product mix. The company is gradually transitioning to a Configure-to-Order (CTO) model, though progress remains slow.
• The Center of Excellence (CoE) Digital, operating out of Vanderlande’s office in Pune, India, is preparing AI-based experiments to facilitate planning operations within the Supply Operations department from Q4 2024 to Q2 2025.
• Concurrently, the Veghel-based team is exploring low-code platforms as a potential means to reduce the workload on the planning team, although this effort is not yet coordinated with the CoE Digital’s AI initiatives.
• A notable gap exists in coordinating various initiatives, with insufficient oversight of available technologies, methods, and up-to-date academic and market knowledge. As a result, the effectiveness of current strategies remains questionable.

It is anticipated that different initiatives will continue to develop in parallel. However, to increase the likelihood of success, the company needs to adopt a high-level perspective to guide these efforts toward cohesive and practical solutions. This phased approach is expected to yield steady progress in addressing the challenges of material planning automation.

More information: escf@tue.nl