Palo Alto Networks - Real Time Planning Enables Proactive Supply Chain Planning and Improved S&OP

Palo Alto Networks utilizes third party manufacturers and suppliers to produce product and manage parts of their supply chain. Internally, Palo Alto conducted a sales and operations planning process (S&OP) in a leading advanced planning system to help manage their supply chain partners and project working capital spend, sales forecasts, and network capacity. Due to the lack of flexibility and Palo Alto's rapid growth, the supply chain planning system became difficult to maintain, business processes became antiquated, and collaboration with vendors became difficult. This led to excess inventory, reduced customer service levels and a reactive planning process.

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Palo Alto experienced an increase in inventory adherence by 10% which has a direct impact on an improved service level. From a technology perspective, the Palo Alto staff was fully trained in Anaplan and has become sufficient to maintain the tool and flex the tool to accommodate an ever-changing business. This has increased user adoption in Anaplan vs. their prior technology and also reduced Palo Alto's reliance on MS Excel to plan.

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Accelytics helped Palo Alto redefine their S&OP process and implemented Anaplan as a real time planning tool to execute their supply chain planning process and increase collaboration across their entire network. In addition, processes that were managed in Microsoft Excel such as new product introduction (NPI), product rationalization, and robust reporting were also borough into Anaplan to increase visibility faster and proactively manage the Palo Alto supply chain network.

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