Part - I

Executive Summary

"Our primary CPFR output concentrates on improving inventory and reducing out-of-stocks. Traditional supply chain management decreased one but forced to increase: trade-offs were made to deal with lesser evil."

- As Procter & Gamble says to Roadmap to CPFR

The Objective of writing the paper is to gain an understanding of whether and how companies are deploying Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) practices and its benefits.

Supply chain collaboration is taking hold as a primary business process. CPFR is proving to be one of the most success mechanisms to transform relationships between partners into winless win situation where customer satisfaction, costs and revenues can all improve simultaneously. Though successful with CPFR will create a wave of activities they expand there programs to move supply chain partners and gain greater competitive capabilities. The study shows that the CPFR wave is ready building momentum and will sweep in to benefit many companies that have not yet embarked on a CPFR program. Now is the time to launch into CPFR activities.

It is apparent that CPFR has a long way to go before it becomes accepted as a mainstream supply chain process by different sectors in industry. Several challenges are currently threatening its widespread deployment, such as organizational and cultural issues, data quality, and technology availability. In addition, CPFR has yet to receive the necessary support from the standards community to appropriately unify software systems to speak the same language and encourage interoperability. Despite these challenges, however, several positive signs exist. The number of trading partners using full SKU information is surprisingly high, as is the level of partners establishing full-scale CPFR implementations.

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* Contributed by -
Deepak Bisht & Nilesh Dewangan,
Students of PGDIE,
NITIE, Mumbai.