By Tom Mcdonough, Senior Director, Product Marketing – Supply Chain Planning 

As a pioneer in the medical devices industry, ResMed is committed to “changing lives with every breath”. Since their founding in 1989, they have made it a goal to empower people to live healthier, higher quality lives, with the mission of saving 20 million lives by 2020.

From a small company in San Diego, ResMed has now grown to an S&P 500 company, operating in 120 countries. Due to this rapid growth in both geographical distribution and product lines, ResMed began to find that their existing systems were not flexible enough to meet their needs and their business was starting to see complexity in forecasting.  For example, demand in America and Europe was relatively stable and predictable whereas for Asia, products were more closely following a make to order model.  Similar discrepancies in forecast requirements were created in growing product lines.  Some products had stable forecasts while others required more of a supply to order approach.

ResMed saw the need to move beyond it’s on-prem systems and upgrade to a cloud platform. They knew that this upgrade would allow them to resolve some fundamental compatibility issues between existing systems, support growth plans and to unlock advanced demand and supply planning capabilities available with Oracle’s Planning Cloud.

They were also looking to optimize their global supply chain system for cost, customer service and consistency. Using class functionality in Oracle’s Global Order Promising product along with taking advantage of more robust forecasting profiles in the Demand Management product has allowed ResMed to better forecast and, ultimately, more reliably fulfill orders. Having the capability to refine forecasts by SKU and distribution center rather than by Country has also helped reduce forecast complexity.

With forecasts becoming easier to manage, the ResMed demand planning team was able to focus on improving forecast accuracy by setting KPI’s on variations between forecasts to determine potential effects of price changes, inventory strategies, new product introductions and marketing programs. After initial testing, the team found that across its 25,000 product locations, 95% of its forecasts were good to go right out of the box.

To learn more about ResMed’s full story, take a look at the case study created by Avata, their implementation partner.