General definition: Allocation and replenishment planning involves determining the optimal distribution of products across various locations and ensuring timely restocking to meet customer demand. Allocation planning is used when supply is constrained, focusing on deploying inventory to maximize impact. Replenishment planning identifies the quantity of inventory to order to meet inventory plan objectives. Together, they create a plan that balances inventory levels across the entire network.
Value it delivers: Effective allocation and replenishment planning enhances inventory management, improves customer satisfaction, and optimizes operational efficiency. This process ensures that inventory is optimally distributed and replenished across the supply network, thereby meeting customer demand efficiently. It helps to maximize the effectiveness of constrained supplies and maintain balanced inventory levels, reducing stockouts and excess inventory. This ultimately improves service levels and operational efficiency.
How Anaplan delivers that value: Anaplan integrates allocation and replenishment planning elements into a unified model, enabling seamless analysis and management of inventory distribution and restocking activities. Anaplan enables this process by bringing together the necessary data and master data. Complex business rules can be applied to automate decision-making. The planner can control those rules through the assumptions they take, and exceptions/alerts can be presented to the planner to highlight where attention is needed. Optimization algorithms, along with AI/ML forecasting techniques, can be used to cater to highly complex interrelationships.
Typical inputs for this use case:
- Demand forecasts
- Inventory levels
- Lead times
- Sales data
- Unconstrained demand
- Constrained supply
- On-hand inventory
- Master data
What this use case feeds into:
- Anaplan use cases:
  1. Supply Chain: Inventory Planning & Optimization
  2. Supply Chain: Master Production Planning
  3. Supply Chain: Demand Sensing
  4. Finance: Cash Flow Planning & Forecasting
- Other business benefits: Optimized allocation plans, replenishment schedules and inventory turnover reports

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