Another Supply Chain Planning SaaS? Again? Really?
As a new player on the market, it’s a fair question to ask what makes us different from every other Supply Chain Planning Solution out there.
Metronome addresses a specific type of problem that so far hasn’t gotten a lot of attention: real-time adaptive planning. Very few players, if any, have looked at supply chain planning with the the following approach: feeding planning with on-the-ground data in order to fix the existing frictions between a given plan and its execution.
Mainly because, software have been historically built out with distinctive categories for planning and for execution. Gartner Supply Chain Research, they define such categories as Supply Chain Planning and Supply Chain Execution. Software solutions over the past decades have predominantly originated from manufacturing environments, where businesses maintain stocks of finished goods. These stocks serve as a crucial buffer, adeptly managing the fluctuations between demand and supply volatility.
Stocking fresh cement on the side of the road.
However, certain environments, such as Logistics Hubs, do not have any stock buffer by design.
In an airport hub, there's no way to clean an aircraft twice now to avoid cleaning it cleaning for the next rotation. Likewise, a cement manufacturer cannot afford to store its products in advance by the Seine in Paris during the Olympic Games.
Our mission is to bridge the gap between the realms of execution and planning through integrated planning. We aim to serve environments where any disruption in the supply chain triggers cascading effects that cannot be mitigated by physical stock buffers. Today, planning teams typically rely on spreadsheets and work around planning solutions to get by.
Terminology Pause:
- Adaptive: The ability to continuously update a plan in real time based on new information. Either top down: change in priority rule e.g. prioritizing a transportation mode over another. Or bottom up: someone at the port knows by experience how to adjust an automated planning suggestion. Some rules cannot be coded. The adaptive capability of a system, allows for replanning at any point in time. It can be triggered by users, with a fresh set of additional constraints and most importantly it takes minutes if not seconds to recalculate.
- Capacity: The ability to view capacity as dynamic variables is essential. Unlike a production line, which has a set run speed, activities that rely on humans or shared resources across multiple companies (such as roads and ports) have volatile throughput. This throughput depends on a combination of factors, ranging from sick days to weather conditions, which can impact various levels to different degrees.
Rightsize CAPEX and OPEX in an interconnected world.
We believe our offer brings something missing for high CAPEX businesses.
Our mission is unchanged since day 1: help businesses rightsizing their CAPEX & OPEX in a fluctuating and interconnected world. At Metronome, we did not start from planning or execution, we started from getting the most out of existing assets and human resources. As such, like others, we are building modules for forecasting, planning, execution (ex: TMS) and analytics.
But our value is in synchronizing all those elements under one roof. Therefore, you'll find the same terminology and building blocks at the surface when browsing our website, but we’re only alike on the surface.
Tools targeted at supply chain logistics have been around for a long time and been perfected to a point where it makes no sense joining the market focusing on a specific area. Our approach integrates forecasting, planning, and execution seamlessly, catering specifically to companies with substantial CAPEX. For those, making the most use of their resources is key and highly valuable.
We help businesses continuously right-size and match resource capacities to workload over the short to long term:
Forecasting Capacity & Analytics: To supervise forecast changes and perform adjustment to ensure that your resources are neither underutilized nor undersized. It is about converting forecast into capacity requirements. This approach prevents unnecessary resources from remaining idle. Conversely, it prevents resource shortages that could compromise customer service, result in lost revenue, or necessitate last-minute, costly external rentals or hires.
Reality-Based Planning : To easily plan and replan resources based on the ever-changing reality of the field. We dispatch, group, combine work given actual expected resources on hand and the latest constraints to optimize the work given the company strategy: from lower cost to optimum service level while considering carbon emissions.
Dynamic Execution: To dispatch workload across teams and equipment and ensure process-compliant execution, using worklows to get a pulse from the ground. Activities can be dynamically redeployed across the network. Without this capability, plannings quickly becomes outdated and ineffective. Indeed, having a tremendous plans but requiring Excel files to be sent by mail manually many times of day to ground teams is like “planning to fail”.
You might still be thinking that others do that already, and you would be partially right, but let me try to shed some more light on the real differences. It starts with our customer’s profiles.
Critical Paths vs Stock Buffers
We offer a specialized solution designed for companies adding value on the critical paths of high CAPEX operations, especially those dealing with operational variability and where maintaining customer satisfaction through stock buffers is not an option.
So here are a few examples:
We enhance CAPEX optimization by efficiently managing resources, particularly in cases where they are costly and limited in availability. Minimizing idle time becomes a crucial driver of substantial gains in such contexts:
- Capacity Utilization: +20% through live re-dispatch of jobs against available assets and skilled resources
- Orders shipped on time: +20% through optimum allocation of activities against most efficient resources
- CO2 Emissions -10% through live re-dispatch of orders through most suited modes, corridors and assets
Most times, we focus on straight-forward business processes like shipment management but for which the process can be achieved through multiple assets, people, transportation modes, and so on. The complexity is to drive the completion on time with the right resource, the process itself moving a product from A to B is relatively simple.
For example, moving goods via a barge. Let’s assume, this barge has to deliver 2 orders but the first one is now late for any reason. The boat operator needs to play the “musical chair game”:
- Know if there is any way for him/her to make up this delay by possibly leveraging a partner’s barges or vessels assuming he/she can check availability in near real time.
- Inform stakeholders of the next order that there might be a delay.
Metronome interconnects all parties over the horizon whether it is over a few days, weeks or even years. The above are simple activities for a skilled planner, but it takes a lot of time and energy to be done. The quality of the solution also hinges on its ability to access real-time data regarding the current capacity available. The amount of fresh information to take optimal decision are usually low because of lack of inter-connectivity between systems and partners.
What our “critical paths” customers are looking for is a way to right-size continuously their resources, getting the most out of them. Whether it's their teams or any of their assets, they must fulfill demand accurately every day and cannot afford to wait for the next day or even week to adjust to unforeseen events, as seen in scenarios involving stock buffers.
While there are a multitude of choices, they fall short of meeting the exact demands of Critical Paths within Logistics Hubs.
Let’s split alternatives into existing solutions used by our target customers and existing solutions from software providers on the market that can offer the same promise.
In most instances, our customers are heavily reliant on a manually maintained excel with all the associated limitations, flaws and risks. What we hear the most is that they simply didn’t find anything else better suited to their needs without the expensive price tag of a fully custom made solution. In this case, the difficulty is finding a solution as flexible as excel with a limited budget.
Many SaaS fall into either the Supply chain Planning bucket (e.g. O9 solutions, Kinaxis Planning One/Rapid response…) or within Supply Chain Execution (e.g. Manhattan WMS, SAP TM…), both buckets being usually connected through a custom data lake led by IT and integrator firms.
- Supply Chain Planning: For the first group, if we dive a little into the details of their offering, they generally target companies that need an end to end supply chain planning solution that can encompass a lot of information such as macroeconomics in order to predict demand shifts and help teams with their medium to long term planning. The benefits strongly related to the quality of tactical choices, which drives 80% of optimization.
- Supply Chain Execution: In this group of software (MES, TMS, WMS…), they offer solutions for manufacturing, distribution, warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation specific for doing the plan, basically executing as per the category name. There are excellent softwares with plenty of features but the ability to re-plan and re-dispatch workload to capacities in real time directly by input from the execution is limited if not lacking.
Others like Celonis, really focus on the business processes as a way to identify efficiency opportunities like the one we’re tackling i.e. CAPEX and OPEX related. Their value is finding how to improve all your processes by connecting them all on their platform and leveraging process mining. This is of high value for companies that have grown a lot and accumulated a lot of entropy. For them, on-boarding an overarching system that will highlight improvements/key areas of focus could be highly valuable. Although, they don’t offer planning and focus on manager-led process analysis over time across all departments and sectors. So it’s about looking at past data to help improve future results rather than reacting on the spot to a new piece of information in order to find an appropriate alternative.
Bringing it all together
We all have a solution aimed at Supply chain management. We all cover the concepts of digital twin or business process workflows simply because they’re the building blocks of an organization and the best way to build a solution that provides intelligence and value.
Metronome on the other hand focuses on short term planning (daily) offering Adaptive Capacity Planning. Our expertise is people and assets, finally proposing a solution for the people who actually do the work to be able to re-plan rapidly when reality hits.
