For companies already operating in Japan
Managed SCM Office
Your supply chain planning function, run for you — measurement, the planning cycle, and the fixes — in Japanese and English.
Supply chain planning in a Japanese subsidiary usually depends on one bilingual planner who is hard to hire, hard to replace, and never allowed a holiday. When that seat is empty — or about to be — the choice has been an expensive search or an adviser who leaves a report.
We offer a third option: the planning function itself, run as a managed office. We have spent eight years inside a foreign-owned manufacturer in Japan running demand and supply planning — as the operator, including Kinaxis and SAP deployments. This service is that experience, packaged in three layers you can enter at any level.
The three layers
Enter at the level you need
1
Control Monitor
We measure, you decide. Every month we measure forecast accuracy, inventory cover, service level and supplier lead-time variability from your standard system extracts, and deliver a six-page report that names what needs a decision — the KPI Watch report. No dashboard, no system access, no work for your team beyond sending the files.
2
Managed Planning Office
We run the planning cycle. Demand and supply plans prepared and maintained, the monthly planning meeting run with your sales and operations people, exceptions worked, and head-office reporting written in English. Your planner’s seat, staffed as a function with a named person accountable — not as a temp.
3
Intervention
We fix what the numbers expose. Fixed-scope projects that come out of the first two layers: rebuilding the planning process, reassessing logistics partners, supporting a planning-system implementation. Defined deliverable, fixed fee, an end date.
All three layers are billed as a fixed monthly or fixed project fee for a defined scope of deliverables. We do not bill by the hour, and we do not sell people by the day.
Definitions
We fix the measurement basis in month one, and never move it
This sounds like housekeeping. It is the part that decides whether the numbers can be trusted from one month to the next.
If forecast error is measured against last month’s plan in one report and against a three-month-old plan in the next, the trend is meaningless. If inventory cover is divided by past sales while demand is falling, the number improves as the problem worsens. So we agree the basis with you in the first month, print it in every report, and hold it.
| Forecast accuracy | Measured per product per month against the plan submitted one month before, weighted by shipped volume — together with its direction (was the plan high or low?), because a one-directional error accumulates as stock. |
|---|---|
| Days of inventory | Closing stock divided by the average daily shipments of the coming thirteen weeks of the current plan — not by past consumption. |
| Slow-moving stock | Stock carrying more than 180 days of cover on that same forward basis. |
| Service level (OTIF) | “On time, in full”: order lines measured against the date the customer originally asked for, not the date later confirmed. A line counts only if it is both on time and complete. |
| Supplier lead time | Order to receipt, by supply source — reported as the average and the slowest one-in-twenty case, because safety stock set on the average stops protecting anything when the spread widens. |
| Estimated lost sales | Unfulfilled order lines valued at selling price, excluding lines the customer re-ordered within the month. |
The difference
Two people can read the same extract and write different reports
Every finding in the monthly report carries three lines: what we see, what it costs, and why it is happening.
The third line cannot be computed from the data. Knowing that a supplier’s slowest deliveries have doubled is arithmetic. Knowing that it matters because your safety stock was set on the average, that the exposed products are chilled, and that two of them run out inside eight weeks — that comes from having run planning inside companies like yours.
That is why the report tells you what to decide rather than what happened.
Continuity
It outlasts whoever is in the seat
Planning knowledge in a Japanese subsidiary usually sits with one person, and leaves when they do. Here, the measurement rules and the full history stay with us. If your supply chain lead moves on, their successor opens the next monthly report in their first week and reads the same measures against years of your own data. Nothing has to be reconstructed.
We send the report to your team in Japan and to your head office at the same time. A measure that only one person sees is not a control.
Starting
Two ways to see it before you commit
Read the sample. A six-page sample report, built on invented data but with the real structure and definitions. Request it below and it arrives by email.
Or see your own numbers. The Supply Chain Health Check is a one-time, fixed-fee review: you send four standard system extracts, and two weeks later you receive the same six-page report built on your own data, walked through with you on a call.
Start by reading one report.
The sample runs to six pages: an eight-KPI summary, three findings with what each one costs, and three next actions. It is built on synthetic data — no client figures — but the structure and the KPI definitions are the ones we use.
