Brief Insight on Benefits of Inventory Planning & Factory Planning Over Spreadsheets

Planning for anything is very important. Without any definite plan, executing any task successfully is a very difficult thing to do. Everything needs to be planned and the problems that can arise need to be thought about from before. Thus it would be easy to solve the problem. Even Sales & Operations Planning is very important. Many people prefer to use spreadsheets in helping them to plan. However, they have many disadvantages as well.

What are the disadvantages of using spreadsheet?

Spreadsheets have many disadvantages. Firstly, it cannot work or produce results when the products are mixed. Spreadsheets always assume a lead-time that is fixed which isn’t the case in real-time. Apart from this, there are many restrictions like product attributes, tool availability and setting up of times. All these features are not available in spreadsheets. Spreadsheets also allow users to change and manipulate the data very easily.

This is not good with respect to the aspect of security of data. The answer to this is specialized planning software. Even though some investment might be required in purchasing the software, yet they remove most of the problems and discrepancies present in spreadsheet.

What is meant by inventory planning and why is it important?

According to a few researches, Inventory Planning & Inventory Management is very important. Increasing the inventory efficiency and optimizing it can help to increase the share values as well as the share-holders of the company. This is because levels of the customer service will increase very quickly and the levels of inventory will be lowered throughout the chain of supplies. This project has very little amount of risk as is very likely to give good returns. The implementation time of this project is also very little.

There is software that can be used to plan the inventories. Such software plans while keeping the budget in mind as well as the interest of the customers. It is quite different from the approach that is traditionally followed. It can also manage many supply chains at the same time and that too very easily.

Such systems require quite a few values as input. Some of them are the minimum and maximum levels of stock, the targets of the inventory and the quantity of the order. A huge number of combinations can be generated. The planner can be used to narrow down these combinations using a set of filter rules.

What are the various solutions to factory planning and how are they important?

Factory planning is also very important. There are many solutions available in the market for factory scheduling and planning. The main job such system is to make the planning of the production levels of the factory better and more efficient. They need to be continuous information about the demand as well as the levels of supply.

The result that is produced is very dependable as well as accurate. Customers are really happy with such systems as it helps to reduce the time of every production cycle. These systems help the customers to use their resources to the maximum and thus achieve the best results. The sequencing of job is done very well.