Innovative yet proven approaches to balance service, cost and cash, reducing cycle times and eliminating anything that does not serve the customer.

Supply Network Design & Modeling
Have the ability to answer these questions with ease: What to make and where to make it? How to distribute products and from where?
S&OP/IBP Continuous Planning
S&OP and IBP processes drive the vital trade-off discussions, increasing sales and profit, while minimizing costs.
World Class Inventory Practices
Proven inventory management programs and tools have every function doing their part to systemically free up cash.
Purchasing Optimization
Creating incremental value through your purchasing organization leveraging world class tools, processes, technology, and professional development.

The supply network is the path to the consumer/customer

A good supply network design flows from your business strategy and a deep understanding of your customer segments and their different service requirements. We can help you design your supply networks and optimize them as conditions change.

Planning leads to options, which in turn leads to decisions

We focus on demand and supply planning as the lynchpin to making the right trade-off decisions across a multi-functional work group. The goal is a successful sales & operations planning process that, as it matures, evolves into a truly integrated business-wide planning process. It’s easy to say, but hard to put in place and keep it running effectively. We can help you.

Deliver top notch service that doesn’t break the bank

You can no longer afford to focus on either service or cash or cost. In today’s competitive market you need a plan to drive service up, while driving cost and cash down simultaneously. Most companies have a handle on their cost savings program, but they don’t have experience driving an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program that runs from the C-suite to the shop floor. We do, and we can teach you.

The bottom line

With effective Purchasing you will create optimal commercial arrangements for your business. We can help you reduce logistics costs, define supply strategies, and enhance your strategic supplier partnerships. Through our professional development program you will implement best in class purchasing processes and consistently deliver savings in cost of goods.

Pain Points

Are you struggling to figure out if you can safely reduce inventory and still protect service?Are silo battles slowing your inventory reduction progress?Is your network fragmented or sub-optimized and you don’t know what to fix first?

We know this terrain well

Zinata people have navigated this ground, and created a simple, but powerful tool called LETSI (as in “Let’s See”) to help our clients. It lets you see inventory in a way that is visual, straightforward and can accelerate systemic, sustained inventory reductions. The tool lets you analyze inventory to determine why it exists (its components and drivers). It provides a visual picture of inventory and its key components that can be understood and acted on by all levels in the organization. As a result, you can confidently take action knowing that service levels will be maintained or improved. LETSI has helped thousands of people tackle this common problem.

See how a major consumer products company used the LETSI tool to drive a 10% reduction in inventory

Aligned in the war on inventory

We see an ongoing struggle between a corporate inventory reduction goal and manufacturing’s desire for high throughput, and the resulting long run times. But there is a way to make these goals compatible. Manufacturing plays a critical role in an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program too. The work starts with world class manufacturing practices. Lean and TPM practices combined with a high performing work team can deliver amazing improvements in changeover time reduction, defect reduction and quality improvement. Our success with clients has made us true believers in these secret weapons in the war on inventory. The marriage of SKU rationalization and a product wheel approach to production planning can unleash both OEE improvement and inventory reduction. With strong, reliable operations in place, many clients master the ability to produce to demand.

A hard look informs a solid strategy

It is tempting to jump into supply network design. Resist the temptation. We have a strategy alignment process to ask the right questions about where your business is headed and what your levers of competitive advantage are (or need to be to win). Our customer segmentation accelerator takes you through the steps to identify your customers’ service expectations, groups them into segments and then uses that data to design a supply network that meets or exceeds those needs. Sometimes it helps to conduct a portfolio analysis and a SKU rationalization process to clean up your line-up before you optimize it. Then it’s all about crunching the numbers via a supply network modeling exercise and doing some options analysis.

The final step is to create an operating strategy from the category or family level down to the site level. Documenting your operating strategy gives you a means to guide your thinking when market changes occur. It guides those important trade-off decisions that come up in your integrated business planning meetings.

Are you struggling to figure out if you can safely reduce inventory and still protect service?

We know this terrain well

Zinata people have navigated this ground, and created a simple, but powerful tool called LETSI (as in “Let’s See”) to help our clients. It lets you see inventory in a way that is visual, straightforward and can accelerate systemic, sustained inventory reductions. The tool lets you analyze inventory to determine why it exists (its components and drivers). It provides a visual picture of inventory and its key components that can be understood and acted on by all levels in the organization. As a result, you can confidently take action knowing that service levels will be maintained or improved. LETSI has helped thousands of people tackle this common problem.

See how a major consumer products company used the LETSI tool to drive a 10% reduction in inventory

Are silo battles slowing your inventory reduction progress?

Aligned in the war on inventory

We see an ongoing struggle between a corporate inventory reduction goal and manufacturing’s desire for high throughput, and the resulting long run times. But there is a way to make these goals compatible. Manufacturing plays a critical role in an enterprise-wide inventory reduction program too. The work starts with world class manufacturing practices. Lean and TPM practices combined with a high performing work team can deliver amazing improvements in changeover time reduction, defect reduction and quality improvement. Our success with clients has made us true believers in these secret weapons in the war on inventory. The marriage of SKU rationalization and a product wheel approach to production planning can unleash both OEE improvement and inventory reduction. With strong, reliable operations in place, many clients master the ability to produce to demand.

Is your network fragmented or sub-optimized and you don’t know what to fix first?

A hard look informs a solid strategy

It is tempting to jump into supply network design. Resist the temptation. We have a strategy alignment process to ask the right questions about where your business is headed and what your levers of competitive advantage are (or need to be to win). Our customer segmentation accelerator takes you through the steps to identify your customers’ service expectations, groups them into segments and then uses that data to design a supply network that meets or exceeds those needs. Sometimes it helps to conduct a portfolio analysis and a SKU rationalization process to clean up your line-up before you optimize it. Then it’s all about crunching the numbers via a supply network modeling exercise and doing some options analysis.

The final step is to create an operating strategy from the category or family level down to the site level. Documenting your operating strategy gives you a means to guide your thinking when market changes occur. It guides those important trade-off decisions that come up in your integrated business planning meetings.