Supply Chain Excellence

Agamus supports industrial companies in generating an overall benefit by designing their value chains in a well-balanced way, taking account of stakeholder expectations, customer requirements and competitive positioning. Agamus’ expertise in this field is bundled in its consulting practice “Supply Chain Strategy”. The supply chain strategy comprises several levels ranging from the cross-company configuration of the value network – supply chain design – to supply chain execution – the stipulation of supply chain targets and their conceptual implementation in the main processes PLAN, SOURCE, MAKE and DELIVER.

Based on the corporate strategy and the customer requirements as well as by taking account of future technological and market developments, the supply chain strategy, which acts as cross-functional tool, enables a smooth interaction between the functional sales, production and procurement strategies.

A successful supply chain strategy is characterized by the activation of the appropriate levers in terms of operations to achieve the supply chain targets, some of which might be competing, such as for instance, reduction of the capital employed (inventories) and increase in the responsiveness (delivery times). In addition to the planning and implementation of concrete improvement measures, an efficient supply chain indicator system will support the measurement of the overall performance as well as a targeted performance management. Combined with a stringent, top-down initiated supply chain strategy identification process the environment for achieving supply chain excellence will have been created.

In terms of the methodology used, our consulting services are based on the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) model, which Agamus has adjusted to the manufacturing industry.

The operational planning process is the backbone of any supply chain. It has an impact on all KPI´s of the supply chain: delivery reliability, responsiveness, adaptability, expenses and capital employed. However, despite this huge impact, the knowledge about the benefits of integrated planning and about the optimal design of planning activities is limited.

Integrated planning enables companies to prepare for customer needs in an optimal way by managing their resources dynamically. It is characterized by integrated planning levels, integrated IT-supported processes, and an efficient sales & operations planning process where emerging target conflicts within a company are addressed proactively and continuously at the management level.

The experts of Agamus support you in implementing a best practice sales & operations planning process, in selecting appropriate supply planning strategies and planning systems as well as in designing and implementing an integrated process architecture ranging from revenue/sales planning (forecasting, demand planning) to shopfloor management (e.g. Kanban, Heijunka solutions).

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Our customers are increasingly confronted with fast-moving, global and volatile markets. Dealing with cyclical increases in sales volumes and the ability to absorb decreases in sales volumes in a cost-efficient way will progressively become decisive criteria for ensuring profitability and competitiveness. The additional challenges resulting from a wide range of varieties, short development cycles and thus short industrialization cycles as well as specific customer requirements do no longer only play an important role with respect to FMCG or the automotive industry, but they have also become an issue for medium-sized industrial companies. These companies, in particular, are facing risks threatening their existence or pass opportunities to competitors which have already entered international markets.

Agamus is an innovative and result-oriented partner of its customers and classifies the solutions that have either been designed in an interdisciplinary and integrated way or individually under the term “increasing agility”. To us, agility is not only the flexibility of a company, but also the ability to adjust itself and relevant sections of the supply chain in order to be able to act proactively to market and product changes as well as changes in the competitive environment.

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To achieve a profitable growth or at least to exist in a globalized economy, companies have to retain their customer, stay focussed on their core competencies and join strategic partnerships in international value networks. Agamus uses the term “supply chain integration” to describe the upstream and downstream expansion of value chains by means of integrating additional supply chain members – customers, suppliers, and service providers. Value chains across companies will create new opportunities but they will also lead to new challenges.

Companies will be able to increase their turnover, improve planning and thus reduce delivery times as well as resource employment by means of upstream integration. Integrating suppliers and service providers, however, will enable companies to outsource activities that do not add value, to reduce procurement costs and raw material supplies as well as to balance capacity bottlenecks.

The challenges of integration include the strategic issue of “what kind of cooperation is desirable” as well as some operational issues such as rigid structures, conservative behaviours, missing employee competencies, heterogeneous IT systems and a lack of transparency within the supply chain.

Agamus supports you in the end-to-end design of processes, organizational issues, IT systems and interfaces: market requirements and customer requests will be integrated into the process improvement efforts; purchasing will improve its strategy; suppliers will be developed, material and information flows will be optimized in an integrated way, and self-operated control loops will be established at the interfaces.

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