Some important features of Supply chain Modelling

Most of the modern supply chain modelling tools hand out some really powerful capabilities in the hands of the supply chain and inventory managers. 

Some of these are 

• An end to end analytics, modeling, and optimization platform
• Functionalities to visualize the future of their supply chains to identify opportunities, inefficiencies, and risks.
• Scenario modelling to investigate hypothetical scenarios with variables which can be set including manufacturing facilities, capacities, distribution networks, supplier networks, retailers, costs, demand (volumes and frequency), sourcing and inventory policies, and transportation modes
• Integration with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software
• Modeling tools to anticipate possible events resulting from that decision and to develop plans to prepare for them.
• Decision analysis tools to help evaluate the scenario not solely on cost, but also taking into account revenue, scheduling complexity, margins, and other factors
• Constraint analysis where for a future potential requirement any constraints could be identified and and possible solutions like when and where it will need to add capacity can be suggested 
• Discrete event simulation to observe where problems will emerge for a specifically defined event before the event occurs, and then ways to adjust accordingly 

Modeling software forces businesses to challenge the kind of assumptions and conventional wisdom that can lead to lazy thinking.

Of course the single biggest challenge is the quality of the data which is fed to these tools and the speed and flexibility of the management teams to act on the information provided by these tools