Digital Twin-based S&OP: How to level up efficiency of your supply chain

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is an integrated planning process that aligns demand, supply, and financial planning and is managed as part of a company’s master planning. The digital Twin-based S&OP is a quite fresh concept now. It is more about advanced technology, such as an AI solution and simulation.

The webinar “Digital Twin-based S&OP: How to level up efficiency of your supply chain” was held to explore the digital twin-based S&OP and the benefits of it’s implementation for supply chain. Supply chain experts with 20+ years of professional experience Tommy You, Stephen Rowley and GMDH Streamline Partner Success Manager Lu Shi uncover this topic in more detail.

Here are some key points of this event.

What is Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a complete copy of all assets, processes, and operational detail that go into supply chain. It is powered by advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.

“It is like a digital representation of a product, an object, a system or a process and if we think of something that we can relate to a flight simulator, its basic concept is a real digital twin version of an airplane so that we can do things in the digital environment, that we can’t do in the practical environment. We can use it to fly a plane from A to B and we are expecting to land at a specific point in time,”– says Stephen Rowley.

AI approach in Digital Twin

AI is used to recognize customer demand patterns and increase forecasting accuracy. Forecasting is based on pre-trained decision trees that apply seasonal time series decomposition, event-based, and intermittent demand models.

Dynamic simulation modeling of supply chain identifies critical issues that can happen in the future and helps take appropriate actions needed to avoid losses.

What is time machine and why is it important?

Time Machine – a simulation tool that executes purchasing recommendations in a simulated ERP system. Time passes as fast as your CPU allows showing you the future of your supply chain in all reports and tabs.

How can Digital Twin level up decision making?

Streamline does a really nice job as a digital twin. It is powerful to perform what if scenarios. Digital twin is here to calculate what it will be if we change the assumption in concern of sales, supply and inventory plan.

How can Digital Twin help with risk management?

Step by step guide:

“We can create detailed scenarios to compare our current projections against our budget, enabling us to identify any discrepancies in expenditures and allocations. By doing so, we can take steps to close the gaps and optimize our supply chain by increasing both the capacity of our own resources as well as those of our suppliers. This will ensure that we can maximize our productivity,”– says Tommy You.

How can Digital Twin ensure Simultaneous Team Cooperation?

The benefits of using Digital Twin for Team Consolidation:

“Digital Twin is a next level of S&OP implementation. We can get all parts of the business working together across a single source of truth. With Streamline we can create a collaborative environment for your various teams”,– says Stephen Rowley.

The bottom line

The Digital Twin helps S&OP teams simulate various decision options and understand the effects of each and the potential impact on other parts of the business. Streamline digital twin software allows to boost the operational growth and provide visibility in real time, that allows to enhance the efficiency of supply chain.