Demystifying NetSuite Demand and Supply Planning

For the past few months, I am visiting and talking to manufacturing companies and one thing is standing out from most of them. This is how it goes. “Supply is crazy these days. Things from China are taking about 3 months to come. I cannot fulfill orders. We are having to ration stock. We are having to take someone’s parts and give it to someone. We are having to airfreight stuff”..

Now if you think about the situation, the demand and supply both changed. While the end customer demand may not have changed quite a bit, but across the supply chain we are seeing demand and supply issues. We call this supply disruption, that trickles up and down the supply chain and every level feels it. You wonder, you are using NetSuite – how to be effective using NetSuite in these conditions. While I am afraid, I don’t have a simple answer, but a few steps:

·?????Something is better than nothing: Create an Item Demand Plan. You can create it manually in an excel and load in NetSuite or get NetSuite generate your Item demand plan. I will be honest, NetSuite Demand Planning algorithms are limited and if you don’t have enough data, the plan may not come out correct.

·?????See Demand and Supply together and not separately: This is the time when purchasing needs to work ever closely together with sales and customer service. While you expect customer service to give demand plan, purchasing also needs to incorporate that in their supply allocation and planning.

·?????Revisit your Item Reorder points and Lead times: ?Group the problem items and go back in the item setup and make sure your re-order points, MOQs, and lead times still hold.

·?????Be Brave, the Supply Planning Workbench is not that complicated as it seems: Build your item strategies and let the planning workbench build your planned orders based on the projected demand (i.e. the demand plan that you created) and/or the actual demand (i.e existing Sales Order with supply need by date).

·?????The Old and Faithful Order Items Page: Select the right date range on the “planned order” tab and process the purchase orders.

·?????Allocate Supply – we have been using NetSuite supply allocation for quite a few customers and it works for the most part with some limitations. The purchase orders will be allocated to the existing demand in the system based on the Allocation Strategies you chose for your business.