we purchase raw materials to a forecast, which is given to us by finished good SKU and month. We take this month forecast, and divide it into 4 weekly buckets, and load that into Baan into a scenario with weekly buckets. That then drives down to the raw materials level which tells us what to buy based on the forecast.

The problem with this is that we have over 1,000 finsihed good SKUs, and every month there are many SKUS where the entire forecast is orderd in the first week of the month (rather than in perfect weekly quantities), which means that we do not have enough inventory in place to meet this demand for certain items. We run into this problem ever month. And it is always a different finished good SKU where this happens so I cannot just bump up safety stocks on a few problem child produc's components.

I have safety stocks setup on many items, but I cannot have safety stocks set on every raw material because we would run out of space. In order for this to work I would literally need a 1 month safety stock setup on ever raw material SKU. This will not work for me - I dont have the space .

Im looking for a suggestion to manage this better. Im sure many companies face a similar situation. Has anyone figured out a creative solution. Obviously long term solution is to forecast better - but thats long term planning solution using Baan.

Hi, in every implementation we have the same problem. The users need the safety stock in time period based instead of a fix quantity.

We are using another planning tool to handle this, Baan does not have this functionality

Regards

What is the planning tool you are using?

You should take a look at VPS, which is a planning tool with very powerfull algorithems used for forecasting. It is intefaced with Baan Iv and V. www.vps.nl. It is an easy to use planning tool. If you need more information, send me an email at mdroste@quadriceps.nl

Sorry, you should look at www.vps2000.nl