Supply Chain Management Clients

Supply Chain Management

Practical Computer Applications (PCA) has designed and developed several sophisticated Supply Chain management systems to drive our Clients’ supply-chain planning and logistics needs.  Supply-chain solutions involve complex sourcing, orders, production, inventory and distribution processes.

The business objectives of our Clients with complex supply-chain management needs are remarkably similar: simplify/rationalize business processes, provide accurate information to the right people, and help produce and deliver higher quality product faster, with fewer resources. Tackling these critical issues can be challenging, but the outcome of a streamlined system can make a huge difference in a company’s productivity and profitability.

PepsiCo is the world’s fifth-largest food and beverage company, with 15 brands — each generating more than $1 billion in annual retail sales. PCA designed and developed a sophisticated Supply Chain management suite for Pepsi International beverage and snack. Capabilities includes: Sales Forecasting, Days-of-Supply, Inventory, Deployment and Production Scheduling. The Smart Client solution replaced hundreds of Excel spreadsheets, and provides PepsiCo with a repeatable and systematic approach to effectively balance product manufacturing, warehousing and distribution against seasonal sales projections around the globe. Among the key business issues that PCA helped to solve for PepsiCo’s SCM needs include: demand forecasting, days-of-supply, seasonality curves, regional and multi-lingual SCM Configurations, and roll-up planning and operational status reporting.

PCA designed and developed a custom Smart Client database solution that streamlined a number of complex source-to-order, shipping, and invoice management for over 4,000 SKUs from multiple international suppliers. The Supply Chain solution connects vendors in Asia and Europe with IMG operations and its customers in the US — and substantially streamlines IMG’s order to fulfillment operations. The PCA solution replaced a legacy MS Access system that IMG had outgrown, and enables IMG to offer its vendors and customers superior service value with fewer resources (reduced cost).

In-house Supply Chain Management Systems

“Office grown” supply-chain management systems and business processes have a tendency to become overly complex and convoluted. New features accumulate over time, producing a quilt-work of disconnected functions that become increasingly burdensome for Users and costly to maintain. PCA can help you rationalize your in-house system and business processes. We will perform a thorough evaluation of systems, workflow and business needs, and help you design and develop a solution that is streamlined, simple to use, and cost-effective.

SAP Implementations: Lots of Critical Gaps

Some SCM platform vendors offer a single, comprehensive SCM solution e.g. SAP’s Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO), which requires extensive customization and integration to function effectively. It is no mystery that the SAP “tuning process” can take years, can cost far mare that the software license itself, and the result leaves many “gaps” in daily data management needs.

PCA understands that the methods you rely on to plan and track demand, supply, manufacturing status, logistics and distribution are highly unique to your business. Moreover, how supply-chain partners are integrated into the business process is also very different from one business to the other. We take a bottom-up, custom-design approach to solving our Clients supply-chain management needs: we can custom-fit an SCM solution that conforms to your unique business needs, and often for a fraction of what it costs for SAP and other SCM vendor solutionss. PCA SCM solutions are built on the Microsoft SQL Server/.NET Platform, providing the technical and business stability your company demands.

Call us at 1-877-843-3405 or use our form to request more information.