Sumitomo Rubber North America (SRNA) the owner of the Falken and Dunlop Tire brands operating under parent Sumitomo Rubber Industries in Japan. The Falken brand includes passenger car, light truck and medium truck tires alongside a large presence in the Ultra-High-Performance tire space. SRNA has become one of the largest tire distributors in the US serving retail as well as the OEM (original equipment) automotive sector. They sell their products to multiple tire retail chains, specialty shops, racing entities, tier 1 automotive manufacturers. SRNA has many distribution centers located throughout the world with production in the US and Asia.
All supply chain planning was done in Excel. While SRNA has deployed Oracle EBS, they felt the supply chain planning within EBS wasn’t flexible enough to handle the challenges placed on them to exceed customer expectations. As plans were generated in Excel, manual inputs negatively complimented poor data integrity. This led to natural discrepancies in SRNA plans and extremely long planning cycles. Long lead times and a constant recalibration of production plans at SRNA’s Asian plants forced SRNA into a constant state of reallocating inventory across the US market. Without a flexible planning tool in place, the allocation was difficult to execute forcing high levels of inventory. Overall visibility and alignment across operations, sales, and finance was labor intensive. As a result, each functional silo was using their own processes to develop plans in an attempt to satisfy internal and external customers.
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From a Supply Planning perspective, SRNA has improved the time and effort required to create the supply requests to their manufacturing plants while enhancing their ability to allocate and optimize inventory throughout their supply chain network. This has led to reduced capital and increased customer service.
SRNA is also using Anaplan as a foundation to enable their connected planning journey across sales, finance, marketing and supply chain. This will allow them to run more simulations and review the impact of the choices to make more informed strategic business choices.
SRNA partnered with Accelytics to standardize and optimize their planning processes both technically and functionally. Accelytics created an initial project timeline leveraging their Accelerated Approach Methodology. This enabled the SRNA team to implement an in depth supply planning solution in a 14-week time frame leveraging Anaplan as the catalyst.
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