THE CEL WAY

The CEL Way

Since 2005 we have helped hundreds of clients in dozens of industries. It's been a rich and insightful way to understand how supply chains work in different markets, how it is perceived internally, why they are often dysfunctional and what are the levers to keep it aligned with customer demand, financial objectives and with environmental impact reduction goal.

We've helped to design, optimize, accelerate, strengthen, reorganize, coordinate supply chains, and we have realized over years how loosely connected the supply chain operations are with financial reporting. In most cases, it takes ages for most companies to get proper reliable and actionable figures to support decision making.

The CEL way is Holistic

We consider supply chains as systems with hundreds of very interdependent activities. We also see supply chain as being the enabler for revenue and the generator of most costs, thus being one of the main lever for profitability. We interact with Sales to understand the impact of specific decisions on the customers, we interact with Marketing to review product portfolio prioritisation, we talk to finance to understand the costing bias behind operational activities or review investment capabilities, we align with Planning to review demand/supply assumptions, we talk with field operators to get a fine understanding of the reality of operations...

We see supply chain as being the backbone of the company, thus linking to all key functions to get a better, finer and broader picture of what can and can't be done. We focus on identifying and solving the systemic root causes and not the symptoms.

The CEL way is Precise

The complexity of a supply chain depends on 3 main factors: Number of customer delivery points, number of products in the portfolio, number of facilities required to source, make and distribute goods. The challenge resides in the difficulty to aggregate, simplify the system to make it manageable by humans.

We believe that aggregation is dangerous for supply chains. You can't manage aggregated inventory as each SKU would have its own behaviour and stock. You can't have an accurate costing if you assume your customers are at the same location. You can't optimise your network if you don't consider each facility independently from others.

Thanks to advanced analytics, data science and modeling, CEL maintain the level of details available in the transactional data allowing to get very precise understanding of specific customers, product, region... Aggregation can happen to communicate, but conclusions are taken with the finest understanding of internal behaviours.

The CEL way is Engaging

CEL developed a top-notch project management practice that allows clients to engage from day one into considering better ways of managing their supply chain. Respectfully challenging we propose different perspectives that can either lead to quick and easy wins or to more structural changes. The appetite for change is often the roadblock. We also understand that there are strategic forces that come at play beyond supply chain operations and we integrate these external influencers into our recommendations so stay relevant to the particular context of each single business and market dynamics.

We also put a great attention to being always factual in what we recommend. We are not pushing "expert opinions" like most consulting firms. We actually drive improvement by proving scientifically the potential benefit of each initiative we bring to you. Validation of such initiatives is done by each relevant stakeholder (being finance, supply chain, sales, marketing...)

The CEL way is Simulation

While most firms would look at optimising supply chains in the sense of finding the very best configuration for a given baseline, we chose to focus on simulation instead. Optimization is performed with a solver giving one single outcome. This outcome is:

Valid only for a static version of your system, i.e. for a given volume, a given set of products and customers.
Sometimes irrealistic as too theoritical and offering no practical alternative

Simulation however helps to test different configurations and compare them. Trade-offs become much easier to address when you have a full picture of what are the levers to increasing performance. Thanks to simulation you can practically compare: Investing in new capacity vs. outsourcing, centralised vs. decentralized model, lower inventory vs. higher service level, faster vs. lower cost deliveries, expanding to this part of the market vs. status quo... Then combine different scenarios into a final bulletproof, future-ready supply chain.

Also, simulation helps to stress test the business by easily simulating extreme scenarios and assessing the resilience of your supply chain. This feeds then the development of a precise and relevant Business Continuity Plan.

Finally simulation helps to design new supply chains from scratch without the need to have existing data. It's the most effective and precise way to perform investment business cases, determine capacity required, define volumes and condition to support bidding processes (e.g. 3PL selection), etc.

Finally simulation helps to maintain the dynamics and granularity of the demand (i.e. customer orders). As we witness a strong evolution of consumer demand in recent months, years, it is important to recognize the fact that the demand of tomorrow is going to be different from the current one. Channel shift, ordering pattern changes, regulation restrictions, competitor's influence, among others, are factors that can be modeled and simulated against your supply chain to evaluate its capacity to adapt.

OUR TECHNOLOGY

O P T I M I Z A T I O N

M A C H I N E L E A R N I N G

Optimization algorithm to minimize cost-to-serve, inventory, service level, shipment file rate, scrap and obsolescence, delivery routing, asset utilization, carbon footprint,…

ML algorithm for customer segmentation, vehicle video recognition, fleet tracking, data cleansing, demand prediction, seasonality monitoring

Network Simulation Engine dedicated to complex systems and heavy data load. Designed to reduce computing time. Live scenario experiments

S I M U L A T I O N

A D V A N C E D A N A L Y T I C S

Web based analytics with benchmark data, interactive display, data mining and simulation capabilities