SmartPlan is a powerful inventory planning solution that was created to help manage your stock purchases and stock levels in a simple, smart, and affordable way.
It provides small, medium and even large businesses with the chance to apply robust proven calculations and logic to determine what stock to order or produce, and when, to keep the right stock level to meet customer demands. And at a fraction of the cost vs. other competitors.
Operated with Excel, SmartPlan brings powerful functionality in a package that can be set-up and running in hours by all users, whether seasoned demand planners in established companies, or newbies running their new ‘working from home’ ventures from their front room.
Using updates to current stock, forecasts, and orders, SmartPlan will determine what you need to order or produce next, and when. Planning reports in both weekly and monthly buckets can be used within your company and with your suppliers to share collaboratively how the demand was determined and to overcome together any short-term challenges.
Why SmartPlan?
Accurate stock planning is more vital than ever.
Businesses are facing extreme challenges in maintaining supply to customers; not fulfilling customer orders is the number 1 reason for a customer to switch to a competitor. It is vital for your business to maintain it’s customer base, so it is vital for your business to manage its product inventory.
Challenges include unpredictable and volatile demand, supplier delays, lead-times and minimum order quantities. Add the extra complexities presented by a global pandemic, and suddenly the ultimate goal of fulfilling orders on time seems even further away.
With SmartPlan you can:
- Optimise inventory, ensuring you order what you need without tying up excess capital that can be invested in other parts of your business.
- Calculate the optimum stock levels you need to ensure you have sufficient stocks to meet orders, reducing the likelihood of stock-outs, thereby reducing lost sales.
- Determine the cost of your purchases and the total value of your stock levels, both now and projected into the future, to help better manage your cash glow.
- Get the right quantity of the right product in the right place, the ultimate goal of a demand management process.
- Forecast shortfalls or excesses over a two-year timeframe.
- Show up to 200 products in each planning sheet.
- Be set-up and ready to use in hours, no matter what your experience.
Advanced Features & Support
Summary Dashboard
SmartPlan generates a summary dashboard following each planning run that, at a glance, provides an update on the orders, levels of stock and working capital required to maintain optimal customer service.
Easy Order Planning
Easily see how much you need to order right now, so that you don’t get caught short, or accidentally order too much. No more time consuming calculations, manually calculating and piecing together multiple spreadsheets.
Future Order & Stock Values
Understand all the orders that you need to place for the next 2 years, how much they will cost, and the projected value of your stock your budget and cash flow in one place.
Simple Set-Up
Typically following our on line guides you can be up and running in hours rather than months it can take for cloud based systems. This is a function of the revolutionary way we are using excel to replicate best in class supply chain system functionality. Running the plans each month typically takes between 1-2 hours depending upon the number of items you need to plan
Our step by step guide will help you set up add the data to run the SmartPlan, we have kept all the technical elements to a minimum but there’s no avoiding the “data” if you want to plan properly and maintain the correct stock levels.
Same features available in major online planning systems
The mathematics and functionality are traditionally only available on large planning systems that are completely unsuitable for small business. For the first time SMEs can now access this power in a package that is both useable and highly affordable
Use of your existing Microsoft Excel application
Microsoft Excel is arguably still the most powerful, best understood and most common business application in the world. We have used Microsoft Excel as the platform for creating SmartPlan. This means you don’t need to learn a whole new complicated software, nor place your data somewhere in the ‘cloud’. You will run your inventory planning on your own computer.
All that we require is that you have an existing Microsoft Excel installation. To supplement this we ‘wrap’ SmartPlan with an encryption layer – this ensure that your files can only be accessed by those with a SmartPlan license..and it protects the calculation logic of the system.
Our Technical team will be happy to help with any questions you may have on
Order List Generation
SmartPlan will generate a list of all orders to be placed for the next 24 months. This can be filtered per supplier, per month and is to the day (not all companies need this accuracy) to ensure that you maintain the optimal stock levels. This information can be used to generate the purchase orders required in your standard format.
Protected Data
We do not have any of your data, we will not be asking for your data, we will not be analysing your business or harvesting your information. This is unique to the way we have designed SmartPlan without compromising best order management mathematics under the hood.
SmartPlan has been designed to use Excel as a platform to ensure that your data is always safe from 3rd parties unlike cloud based systems. The planning data, both the data to set up SmartPlan “static data” and the elements that need refreshing each planning cycle are kept within the various sections of SmartPlan.
We do not need to see your confidential forecasting, pricing, stock levels or supplier data.
Friendly Support
We provide thorough, on hand support for all of your SmartPlan needs. From live chat to phone support, demo’s, helping you get up and running and more, our team are available Monday to Friday to lend a helping hand, no matter what the requirement.