Features and modules

Strategic Budget Planning

Budget control with strategic planning

Strategic budgeting allows you to define targets such as sales or demand in terms of units. This transforms business planning into medium to long-term sales and budget planning. Increase transparency, quality and predictability by turning conflicting goals and plans into synergies. TIA A3 connects operational and strategic planning and results in dynamic planning.  

You can plan by market, by country or by sales channel, as well as by quantity or even by value. It also considers item options, order types (pre- or post-order), retail planning and market segments. 

TIA A3 bridges annual or seasonal scheduling and rolling operational scheduling. 

Merchandise Planning

Basis for product development and purchasing 

Our merchandise planning module gives you the opportunity to define the structure of your product range. Decide how and which products or ranges will achieve your company's strategic goals. Use historical data to plan the number of items and options by product group, price range, target audience or other custom segmentation. The result is a specification for product or collection development.  

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

Rolling Demand Planning 

Centralised article and category planning 

TIA A3’s central planning module is the rolling planning. This is where all the information from upstream planning modules such as annual/budget planning and merchandise planning comes together, is evaluated and converted into rolling gross requirements. Fully automated forecasting through trend calculation module, that can be conveniently edited by users, considering historical data, statistics and other influencing factors.  

Highlights and features:

• Forecast through time series analyses
• Automatic selection of the most appropriate forecast model
• Independent optimization through error measurement and updating
• Independent evaluation of forecast reliability
• Outlier and structural interruption detection
• Better planning reliability

Dynamic Size Split

Calculating the sizing key and quantity distribution 

For procurement at SKU level, the quantities at the ‘colour’ planning level can be automatically prised open. This results in a gross requirement at the ‘size’ level that can either output to downstream MRP systems or input to TIA A3. The calculation of the size key is based on current and historical order entries. The weighting of the data depends on: 

• The order period
• Customers clusters (margin size problem) 

Highlights

• Calculation of historical data 
• Easy to refer and copy
• Exclude irrelevant customer data

Material Planning

Reduce effort and optimize orders 

By considering and calculating an economical order quantity, high storage costs and unnecessary deliveries can be avoided. Moreover, the software provides an early warning system to prevent shortages. 

TIA A3 also supports Asian sourcing. Your desired delivery date can be entered into the system. This calculates replenishment times considering supplier holidays, international holidays, or goods receipt days, among others.  

Inventory optimization

To achieve optimal stock levels, stock-outs are avoided, overstocks are reduced and remnant quotas are lowered. TIA A3 makes replenishment planning effective with the following features: 

• Ordering schedule/date
• Minimum order and calculated quantities
• Refill function according to value, quantities, weight, container etc.
• Management by exception for problem cases from a material planning perspective (via ranges, shortages, capacity limits etc.)
• Status analysis to identify shelf warmers, ABC-XYZ analysis + classification etc.
• Optional: variant/colour key, list of the bill of materials

AI-based forecasts

Based on historical data for all items and production segmentation, demand is forecasted up to 24 months into the future. So-called seasonal effects are identified in advance and considered when forecasting demand. There are also some other highlights of the forecasting software: 

• Automatic detection of trend, outliers, structural deviations and breaks
• Automatic autocorrection for forecasting errors
• Automatic selection of the so-called BEST fit forecast from n-calculated models
• Key figure system for analysing forecast data

Expert assesment

A panel of experts assesses the sales potential of products before they go on sale.

Extrapolation

Reliable sales forecasts just days after going live.

Trend calculation

Self-learning best-fit algorithms for sales forecasting.