Elango Muthukumaran

Supply Chain Professional with over 20 years’ experience in consulting, product design, GTM and strategic partnership building. Extensive experience in working with senior management of Fortune 500 companies on supply chain strategy, process design and change management. Deep expertise in reconfiguring/ designing supply chains to be a source of competitive advantage (e.g., aligning supply to demand, adaptive and efficient supply chains, enabling growth opportunities through end-to-end segmented supply chains).Proven Experience in leading and motivating teams to successfully implement operations transformation programs across a range of industries.

Details of Various supply chain implementations across industries.

Demand, ESP, Inventory Optimization and SnOP solutions implementation

Company/Client: Tata Consumer Products Limited

Working with Tata foods and beverages demand and supply planners to design an integrated business planning solution that will facilitate central and collaborative forecasting and planning in India

• Requirement gathering and Blue Yonder solution functional mapping based on needs of the demand, supply, inventory optimization and sales and operations planning
• Review and sign-off key design decisions based on workshops with cross functional teams
• Analyzed and recommended forecasting levels, strategies and hierarchies
• Designed the interfaces between Blue Yonder/JDA and SAP

Worked extensively with planners and planning heads to bring about process change in order to facilitate the solution implementation

Business Benefits

• Improved forecasting accuracy up to 98 % by facilitating secondary level forecasting.
• Reduction of inventory holding costs by utilizing multi echelon inventory optimization and dynamic deployment to rebalance inventory
• Reduction of procurement cost switching from monthly to weekly ordering cycle
• Transition from Siloed planning to a Cross functional collaboration approach using the SnOP tool

Replenishment Planning for the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States ( March 2009 to June 2011)

Key Business Objective & Goals

• Improve and leverage the supply chain and planning processes within the operations
• Improve production planning and execution
• A tool to help determine what products to order, when, and in what quantities, so the client would have the right products at the right place at the right time
• A tool to enable us to bring on shorter shelf life items and better manage them
• Initial goal: Improve service levels (reduce out of stocks) to 98%
• Subsequent goal: Reduce inventory levels
• Make process of generating purchase orders less cumbersome

Business Benefits

• Improved Service Level (reduced stock outs) to 98% or better
• Purchase Order Process Improvement from 20 minutes to 1-3 minutes
• Systematic reduction of safety stock to a maximum of 4 weeks (from an average of 11 weeks)
• Reduction in inventory levels made possible by multi echelon planning
• Savings on transportation costs due to PO consolidation and optimized TLs (and minimal LTLs)
• Effective supplier collaboration increased due to availability of aggregated demand across the entire supply chain

Demand and Fulfillment technology implementation

Company/Client: China Resource Vanguard (CRV China)

Worked in Shanghai China closely with the CRV central demand planning team in and designed and implemented a demand planning and promotions management solution for 32 eastern China stores (32 stores)

• Work with demand planners and promotional planners across all categories
• Simulate and pick best mode of planning algorithm at multiple product location hierarchy
• Analyzed and recommended demand aggregation and reconciliation strategies to central planning team
• Implemented automated promotions logic using out of the box approach
• Built POC and implemented multi-level multi model forecasting for various product categories
• Fine-tuned Lewandowski and Regression forecasting model parameters depending on product classification, seasonality and moving events

Business Benefits

• Facilitated centralized demand planning and promotions management across all 32 stores
• Realized forecast improvement in the range of 14 to 26 % depending on product category and store
• Brought change in promotions planning by bucketing promotions types based on past impacts there by making it more manageable to planners and relevant to the forecasting model

Replenishment Planning for the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States ( March 2009 to June 2011)Key Business Objective & Goals

• Improve and leverage the supply chain and planning processes within the operations
• Improve production planning and execution
• A tool to help determine what products to order, when, and in what quantities, so the client would have the right products at the right place at the right time
• A tool to enable us to bring on shorter shelf life items and better manage them
• Initial goal: Improve service levels (reduce out of stocks) to 98%
• Subsequent goal: Reduce inventory levels
• Make process of generating purchase orders less cumbersome

Business Benefits

• Improved Service Level (reduced stock outs) to 98% or better
• Purchase Order Process Improvement from 20 minutes to 1-3 minutes
• Systematic reduction of safety stock to a maximum of 4 weeks (from an average of 11 weeks)
• Reduction in inventory levels made possible by multi echelon planning
• Savings on transportation costs due to PO consolidation and optimized TLs (and minimal LTLs)
• Effective supplier collaboration increased due to availability of aggregated demand across the entire supply chain

Technology/Skills: SAP IBP Supply Planning implementation

Company/Client: Cargill Starch and Sweeteners North America

Enabling the Starch and supply optimization based on deliver maximization and contribution margin

• Business requirement gathering and solution design of Supply Planning tool including scenario planning
• Integrating their supply planning to align with their monthly Integrated Business Planning process
• Working with planners to develop dashboards and alerts for KPIs
• Playing and advisory role in recommending cost parameters for supply optimizer
• Liaising with Cargill business and Deloitte to ensure that the solution design is in line with the requirements

Business Benefits

• Replaced of their legacy Supply Network Optimization tool and enabled the business to work out of short-term delivery maximization and midterm contribution maximization supply plan across their entire North America business

Integrated replenishment planning and forecasting for the world’s largest global biopharmaceutical company's healthcare division (June 2011 to March 2012)

Business Benefits

• Estimated $3M to $6M in fill rate improvements due to increased forecast accuracy
• Estimated $5M to $15M in customer VMI replenishment expansion
• Better Order frequency due to integrated replenishment planning

Distribution planning for one of the largest intimate apparel brand (Nov 2011 – July 2012)

• Worked as a Solution Architect for implementing Forecasting and Distribution planning solutions
• Designed and implemented solutions for planning of new store openings
• Implemented process for reducing inventory obsolescence
• Implemented solution for alternate item planning and end of lifecycle item replacement

Business Benefits

• Improvement in forecast accuracy for short life cycle apparels
• Efficient allocation of aggregated forecast
• Substantially reduced stock outs at retail stores during new season sales and promotions
• Centralized forecasting and replenishment planning for their global supply chain
• Provided ability to plan for presentation and display safety stock at retail stores