RapidResponse

"Its a user friendly Supply Chain tool which makes planners life easy"

Overall: I worked as a material planner for the first 5 years of my career and the last 4 years I am working as a Rapid Response Author and Administrator. During the first 3 years, i struggled to do the material planning as we are doing all the planning related things manually using the excel sheets. Then we adopted Rapid Response and it helped me greatly in preparing the shortage reports and plan the Production lines. Earlier I used to take 2 days to prepare some complex reports and with the help of rapid response, I was able to do that within 1 or 2 hours. Also, it helped me to plan the inventories and mange the excess. I helped me do the what if impact analysis Whenever there is a fluctuation in demand(Increase or Decrease). Also normally we used to do the planning for 13 weeks,With the help of rapid Response we were able to do the planning for the next 1 year. It improved the long term visibility. I have used several planing tools and there is no best tool than this for a material planner. As a developer also now I can easily implement the supply chain solutions to my customers. Keep updating the tool and add new functionalities in the upcoming days. Happy to be a kinaxis user as well as a developer.

Pros: It is a very user Friendly Easy to navigate since it looks exactly like working in excel sheet Long term Visibility of demand and supply. We can easily do the What if analysis in case of increase or decrease in demand and plan the materials based on that. Very Helpful in Excess and inventory management. From the Software perspective The coding is less complicated and easy to understand. We can easily implement modern supply chain functionalities. Scorecards and dashboards are an added advantage which helps the management in decision making.

Cons: Sometimes I feel like I don't have all the training materials to keep me up to date with all the functionalities that kinaxis offers to the customers Due to this most of the time we say no to the customers although there is a way to implement the requested functionality in Rapid Response. Please make the training materials more accessible so that the developers can implement the requested solutions. Also, we feel the training cost is a little high for small companies to afford. From the software perspective Sometimes when we use the heavy tables in the workbooks it will take more time to load.It will be good if the tool performs a little faster. Also please make sure to keep adding updates to the mobile application and also take steps to create awareness to promote the mobile application.

"Kinaxis RapidResponse is so fast"

Overall: The Kinaxis Rapid Response is a very helpful and effective tool. It enables the user to monitor the performance of his business and keep him updated in every transaction. It works effectively even on complicated business environment. It is worth to keep.

Pros: Single Solution - RapidResponse is a single product that supports a complete end to end process and is fully integrated. There is no need for batch schedules to run to sync data between the capabilities of the solution. The S&OP, demand planning, supply planning, capacity planning, inventory optimization, collaboration, allocations, and what-if scenario planning are all within a single data model with a single user interface. Rapid Scenarios - Within RapidResponse, any user can run a scenario in seconds. RapidResponse has a unique capability where the demand and supply balancing engine is always on and it runs in memory. This empowers users to be able to take a virtual copy of the entire database in a second, change any type of demand, supply, lead time, on hand, costs, etc. and run a the new plan within seconds. Embedded Analytics - RapidResponse natively has dashboards that are drillable and are based in memory on the live database - there is no need to push data out to a data warehouse for analytics. Flexible Exceptions - RapidResponse allows you to build your own exceptions and alerts to help with planner productivity. You aren't limited to the native exceptions within the planning tool - any sort of exception that you can define a rule can be easily deployed and users can be alerted via dashboards and alerts to their emails when the exceptions occur. Integrated Financials & KPI Scorecards - Many planning tools can help planners answer the question whether they can support a plan, however, RapidResponse helps planners take that a step further and answer the question of which strategy should you plan to based on your KPIs important to your business. These KPIs can be financial based such as revenue, margin and costs or they could be numerical based such as fill rates, on time delivery to request percentage, or key constraint utilization.