Nampak goes for continuum of supply chain planning and scheduling management

Nampak, Africa’s largest, and the world’s most diversified, packaging manufacturer, says it expects “to more effectively anticipate and respond to changing business conditions,” following implementation of JD Edwards’ integrated production and distribution planning (PDP) engine, which now includes supply chain event management (SCEM). Ronny Saelens, Nampak’s project manager, doesn’t give numbers, but this is a big implementation. “We selected [the system] as part of a larger enterprise-wide initiative in which we are replacing the company’s legacy systems with JD Edwards’ full product line of integrated ERP and advanced planning applications,” he says. “We expect to gain greater visibility into our supply network … while delivering superior customer service,” he adds. The SCEM extension has only just been formally launched. Ed Stubbs, one of JDE’s senior pre-sales consultants, says the firm has been “quietly accruing SCEM functionality”. With SCEM, he says key suppliers and partners can not only window into the supply chain customers’ changing plans and schedules, but get directly involved with anything from available to promise (ATP) to profitable to promise (PTP – the costing analysis that determines when and what to produce for optimal gain). “It was monitoring only; now we’ve added editing, alerts and exception controls and editing via web browser or Excel client access, so that they become part of the overall plan,” says Stubbs. In fact, they get instantaneous response tools, so that managers can modify production and distribution plans according to real world situations, and changes are then reflected in the most recent production and distribution schedules. SCEM also allows users to make recommendations and modify rules and responsibilities in real time, enabling all parties to be involved in the decision-making process. Unlike batch planning solutions, there is no lag time between an event and a response. Interfaces to the system are role-based and configured with appropriate views and actions. Says Stubbs: “They get FYIs and transactions on violations of business conditions or whatever, and they can drill down and see what happened.” As for software ownership, that can be by supply chain leader, independent ASP (application service provider) or shared, and JDE says it will support whatever manufacturing users want. Either way, all third parties need to participate is their browsers. PDP is part of JDE’s v5 software family, covering supply chain planning, covering distribution, manufacturing, sourcing constraints and costs.