How to Understand The Shortage of Publications on Global Planning
Executive Summary
- The Publication Coverage of the Area
- Extra Planning Overhead of Global Instances
- The Many Benefits of Global Implementation
Introduction
I performed a literature review before writing the article. It turns out; there is little written on the topic of centralized or decentralized supply chain planning. What I was able to find was just a few.
What I was able to find were just a few high-level articles and papers that address the topic.
Regarding books, “Global Supply Chain Planning: Impact of International Taxation and Transfer Pricing” was focused on the financial and tax impacts of global sourcing. The book “Supply Chain Management: Coordination of Operations Planning: Decentralized approaches” does look at the benefits of decentralized supply chain planning. “Supply Chain Network Design: Applying Optimization and Analytics to the Global Supply Chain” looks at global supply chain design regarding its physical layout.
The Publication Coverage of the Area
While different articles and books like this talk about the business aspects of global supply chain design, management, and planning, none seems to cover how to set up a supply chain planning system to support global planning requirements. The question is raised at many companies, so I have written and read the global planning requirements documentation for some of my clients. As there was very little published source material to draw from, this book is entirely based on my consulting experience at many companies that have implemented global designs. Knowledge of how to set up global designs is a valuable skill and knowledge base to have, yet, not that many people know how to do it well.
Furthermore, companies are becoming increasingly interested in running global instances of supply planning and other planning, applications and companies want and should strive for truly global solutions, and this means a single model which processes the global supply chain network from one location (this, of course, can mean various global and regional runs). But there are so many decisions to be made; one instance is truly global that this topic deserves its book.
Extra Planning Overhead of Global Instances
Global instances of APO requires a lot of planning and consideration for integrated aspects. Organizations that have a hard time pulling off a single region implementation – and many companies like this will have a tough time pulling off a global implementation. Global implementations have more failure points, more interactivity, require more customization, and typically need more hardware tuning to make them work within the global operational workflow of the business.
For example, I worked on some projects that had a plan for making their instance global, yet, it was not until I worked for a company that had done it that I understood all of the ins and outs of what needed to be planned. The best way I can explain this is that it is “intense.”
There are a seemingly unending number of threads to follow up once implementation is, in fact, global.
The Many Benefits of Global Implementation
There are many advantages, including reduced cost and standardization – (to a degree, on the other hand, each country and or region will tend to do things differently and thus will often configure their product locations and customize their procedures separately). I have worked on projects where the instance – or installation of all planning solutions is global, yet different project teams – from the various regions (most often Asia/Australia-NZ, US/Latin America, and Europe) are all working to bring about the implementation.
I have found multi-region implementations to be quite beneficial due to information sharing potential between the different teams. Furthermore, as one region tends to go live before the other areas (typically wherever the company is headquartered), the regions and the project teams slotted for later implementation can gain many key observations from the work that preceded them. This is a significant advantage for the company that rolls out the same software globally.
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