Features and modules

Strategic Budget Planning

Target control with strategic planning

With the strategic budget planning, you can define targets such as sales or demand in terms of units.  This transforms corporate planning into medium- to long-term sales and budget planning. Conflicting targets and planning become synergies, increasing transparency, quality and planning reliability. TIA A3 represents the link between operational and strategic planning and leads to dynamic planning.

Plan by market, country or sales channel, as well as by quantity or even value. In addition, article options, order types (pre- or post-order), as well as retail planning and market segments are taken into account.

TIA A3 bridges the gap between annual or seasonal planning and rolling, operational planning.

Merchandise Planning

Basis for product development and purchasing

With our Merchandise Planning module, you define the structure of your product range. How and, in particular, with which products or assortments do you want to achieve your company's strategic goals? This goes far beyond the planning of assortment breadth and depth. With the help of historical data, you plan the number of articles and options according to product groups, price ranges, target groups or other individually defined segmentations. The result of the planning is a shopping list for product or collection development.

The Merchandise Planning module provides you with a simple tool for key figure-based supply optimization.

Rolling Demand Planning 

Central article and product group planning

The Rolling Planning module is the central planning module in the TIA A3 software. Here, all the information from the upstream planning modules such as Annual/Budget Planning and Merchandise Planning flows together, is evaluated and converted into rolling gross requirements. In addition, fully automated forecasts from the "trend calculation" forecasting module are added. All forecasts generated can be conveniently edited by users, taking into account historical data, statistics and other influencing factors.

Highlights and features:

• Forecast calculation through time series analyses
• Automatic selection of the "best fit" forecast model
• Independent optimization through error measurement and update
• Independent evaluation of forecast reliability
• Outlier and structural break detection
• Higher planning reliability

Dynamic Size Split

Calculation of size key and quantity distribution

The quantities at planning level 'color' can be automatically broken down for procurement at SKU level. The result is a gross requirement at the 'size' level that serves either as output for downstream MRP systems or as input for TIA A3 MRP.

The calculation of the size key is composed of current and historical order entries. The weighting of the data depends on:

• The order period
• Customer clusters (marginal size issues, if applicable)

Highlights

• Calculation from history data
• Convenient referencing and copying functions
• Exclusion of irrelevant customer orders

Replenishment

Reduced effort and order optimization

By considering and calculating an economical order quantity, high storage costs and unnecessary deliveries can be avoided. In addition, the software has an early warning system that prevents delivery bottlenecks. 

Furthermore, TIA A3 supports Far East procurement and can include your desired delivery date in the system. In doing so, replenishment times are calculated with regard to supplier vacations, international holidays or, among other things, goods acceptance days.

Inventory optimization

To generate the optimal stock, stock-out situations are specifically avoided, excess stock is reduced and remaining stock quotas are reduced.
In addition, the following features make replenishment planning with TIA A3 effective:

• Ordering rhythms/times
• Minimum order quantities and calculated order quantities
• Replenishment function according to value, number of pieces, weight, container, etc.
• Management by exception for problem cases from the dispatching point of view (via ranges, shortages, capacity limits, etc.)
• Inventory analysis to identify slow-moving items, ABC-XYZ analysis + classification, etc.
• Optional: variant/color key, parts list replenishment

AI-based forecasts

Based on historical data of all items and production segmentation, demand is forecast for up to 24 months in the future. In the process, so-called seasonalities (seasonal influences) are identified in advance and taken into account in the demand forecast. In addition, there are some additional highlights of the forecasting software:

• Automatic trend detection, detection of outliers, structural deviations and breaks.
• Automatic forecast error detection with autocorrection
• Automatic selection of the so-called BEST fit forecast from n-calculation models
• Key figure system for analysis of forecast data

Expert evaluation

Evaluation of the sales potential of products by a panel of experts even before sales start.

Extrapolation

Reliable sales forecasts just a few days after the sales launch.

Trend calculation

Self-learning best-fit algorithms for sales forecasting.