Cohesion: Towards An Intelligent Decision Support System For Customer Order Management

In this paper we present COHESION, a Decision Support System for Customer Order Management in a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company in the brewery sector. COHESION integrates a number of functionalities to help decision makers to match the incoming demand with the existing inventory and the projected supply in the most profitable manner for the company, and includes Available-To-Promise (ATP) functionalities, dynamic optimal order allocation from multi-channel customers to on-hand and projected stock, detailed short-term demand forecasting, analysis of what-if scenarios, or support to present the customer with alternative products in case of scarcity, among others. COHESION is currently being tested before its definitive roll-out and the preliminary tests conducted by comparing in real-time its performance and that of the current (mostly manual) process are extremely encouraging.