DISH Network fine-tunes repair parts planning with the Anaplan platform

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Satellite television provider DISH Network built a supply planning solution in Anaplan to manage 10,000+ SKUs across two U.S. manufacturing sites. The solution, which also connects contract manufacturers and suppliers, saves DISH about eight hours per planner per week and improves supply chain production, lead time, order quantity, and costs.
By delivering end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, Anaplan enables us to manage by exception, which has added tremendous value.
Sid Powar, Senior Manager of Supply Planning and Inventory Control

18000

employees

$15.1 billion

in revenue

  • SOLUTIONS

    Supply Chain

  • INDUSTRIES

    Telco

Challenge

The DISH Network repair supply chain team was relying on more than 500 Excel® spreadsheets in their efforts to provide refurbished receivers for the company’s 13 million subscribers. The spreadsheets, however, were not only incredibly slow and prone to crashing, they also created redundancies and disconnects and lacked real-time visibility. This limited forecasting accuracy, decision-making, collaborative capabilities, and scalability.

 

Results

With Anaplan, DISH has gained real-time visibility into continually changing data, enabling the team to manage by exception, improving forecast accuracy, boosting productivity, and cutting costs. Since using Anaplan, the company has saved approximately eight hours per planner each week, a 20 percent improvement. Employees have been transformed from “data monkeys” into decision-makers, improving their productivity along with their job satisfaction.

Solution

The Anaplan platform was implemented as a planning solution for repair parts for DISH Network receivers. Customized to DISH processes, the Anaplan solution was designed to manage 10,000+ SKUs and included DISH’s two U.S. manufacturing sites, as well as connecting planning capabilities across contract manufacturers and suppliers.

 

 

Why Anaplan

After a comprehensive system review, DISH selected Anaplan to handle its complex supply planning for repair parts. Not only did Anaplan check off all the boxes DISH was looking for—enabling everything from “what-if” analyses and capacity planning, to dashboard creation and collaborative planning with contract manufacturers and suppliers—its cloud-based, customizable design meant that implementation was fast and easy, delivering a rapid ROI. Plus, Anaplan’s built-in flexibility and scalability help DISH seize new opportunities in real time while supporting future growth.

My name is Sid Powar, and I work for DISH Network.

Our use case is supply planning for repair parts.

For us, it’s really important to make sure that the field has enough receivers from the repair stream. My internal customers are production folks. So if they have a good sense of how much material they have, then they can provide a much better commit to the business in terms of how many repaired receivers they will be able to send back to the sales team.

Our supply chain is as complex as it can get. But really, the complexity can get more and more intertwined when you start involving your second-, third-, and fourth-level suppliers—we’re looking at somewhere close to about 10,000 parts being planned in Anaplan.

What Anaplan has given us is the ability to focus on exceptions. So that has saved us a lot of time. Looking at 10,000 parts on a daily or weekly basis, we’ve been able to now focus on maybe 100 parts on a weekly basis. That has given the ability to focus on those critical parts based on cost, based on lead time, based on minimum order quantities.

Right now, with certainty, we have been able to save, for each planner, about eight hours a week. It used to take us almost four to five weeks to get something planned and then create purchase orders and send those out to the vendors. Now we have the ability to create “what-if” scenarios and look at plans, look at sensitivity analysis, and all those things in a matter of a few minutes. By doing that, we now have a lot more flexibility, and if the business changes course, we can correct course a lot faster.

There’s a lot of certainty, a lot of confidence in the data, a lot of confidence in the decisions that we’re making based on the information that we have in the tool.

The nice thing is that it’s cloud-based, and anybody in the organization can just log into the portal, and then get to the model and look at it. Changes on one computer are immediately reflected on another computer.

So there’s a lot of transparency, and a lot of the job satisfaction comes from the fact that they don’t have to send emails and have to add redundancies to what they’re normally doing.

We brought in Anaplan as a planning solution, but really, what it’s become and really evolved into is a decision-making tool. We took our team members and we said, “You’re no longer data monkeys. You are decision-makers.”

It’s really elevated their job satisfaction.