Supply Planning

Match supply to demand without carrying dead stock

Make things more agile, efficient and demand-driven.

Where it hurts

Sound familiar?

Excess stock tying up working capital

Overbuying to cover demand uncertainty locks cash in warehouses and inflates holding costs. The buffer feels safe — until finance reviews the balance sheet.

Sofco's inventory optimisation engine calculates the right stock position by SKU, location, and lead time — reducing excess without increasing risk.

SLOB eating into your margin

Slow-moving and obsolete inventory is a silent margin killer. By the time it shows up in a write-off, the decision that caused it was made months ago.

Sofco flags SLOB risk before it crystallises, enabling your team to take corrective action — markdown, redirect, or cancel — while there's still time.

Inability to optimise safety stock dynamically

Static safety stock rules don't account for supplier variability, demand seasonality, or service level trade-offs. You're either over-insured or under-protected.

Dynamic safety stock modelling in Sofco responds to real-time lead time and demand data — recalibrating automatically as conditions change.

Supply planning is where the demand plan meets the realities of your network, the production capacity, procurement lead times and distribution constraints that decide whether you hit service levels profitably. Sofco balances all of it against a single demand signal to keep service up and working capital down.

Balancing supply against a single demand signal

A great demand plan is wasted if supply cannot respond to it. Sofco's supply planning takes the reconciled demand plan and converts it into a time-phased supply response across production, procurement and distribution, with constraints modelled explicitly so the plan you commit to is one you can actually execute.

Because it works from the same data hierarchy as demand, there is no translation loss between what the market wants and what the network is asked to do. Bottlenecks, capacity caps and material availability are surfaced during planning, not discovered on the line.

Inventory that works for the business, not against it

Inventory is the buffer that absorbs every forecasting and lead-time error, which is why it so often absorbs the working capital too. Sofco's inventory optimisation sets the right stock position by SKU, location and lead time, with dynamic safety stock that responds to real variability rather than a fixed percentage of demand.

Slow-moving and obsolete stock is flagged before it crystallises into a write-off, giving the team time to act through markdown, redirection or cancellation while there is still value left. Excess and SLOB become managed outcomes rather than year-end surprises.

Procurement and distribution that respond to change

Procurement planning turns the supply plan into a purchasing plan that respects supplier lead times, order economics and contract terms, so buyers work from the same priorities as the planners. Distribution planning moves the right stock to the right place across a multi-echelon network rather than reacting to local shortages.

When demand shifts, the supply response shifts with it. Sofco lets you re-plan against the latest demand signal and see the impact on purchasing, production and stock before you commit, so supply stays demand-driven instead of drifting back to make-to-forecast.

From plan to executable schedule

Supply planning outputs feed directly into detailed scheduling, closing the gap between the monthly plan and the weekly run. Capacity and material feasibility are carried through, so what the scheduler inherits is already achievable.

What-if analysis lets you test alternative supply responses, an extra shift, an alternate supplier, a redistribution of stock, and compare them on service, cost and inventory before deciding. Planning becomes a decision tool rather than a reporting exercise.

Bringing financial discipline into the supply decision

Every supply plan is really a commitment of cash, whether in raw material, work in progress or finished stock. Sofco makes that connection visible by carrying cost and inventory value alongside the volume plan, so supply decisions are made with their financial impact understood rather than discovered at month end.

That view lets supply planning support working capital targets explicitly. Where to hold stock, how much to make and when to buy become decisions that balance service against the cost of carrying the buffer, rather than purely operational choices divorced from the balance sheet.

Over time, the discipline of planning supply against financial consequences is what shrinks the gap between the operational plan and the budget, so variances shrink and the forecasting of cash becomes more reliable alongside the forecasting of demand.

From plan to action, faster

A supply plan is only useful if it can be acted on, and quickly. Sofco's supply planning runs on cycles that match the pace of your business, so when demand shifts the supply response is available within the same week rather than at the next monthly review.

That responsiveness is what separates a planning tool from a planning system that drives the operation. Shorter, more frequent cycles let the business adjust purchasing and production to the latest signal rather than executing a plan that is already out of date.

Because re-planning is fast and the impact is visible before commitment, planners spend their time on the decisions that change outcomes, not on the mechanics of producing the plan. That is the shift that makes supply planning genuinely demand-driven.

Challenges we solve