Long-term stockbuilding strategy safeguards product availability
Senior Manager Procurement & Planning, Mikael Andersson, is the man responsible for building up stock levels to cover the transition period during the move from Nynäshamn to Fors. Another part of his brief is to ensure product availability for customers.
As head of procurement and planning, my job is about always being able to guarantee our customers the same deliveries they’re used to – so I carry out forecasts, plan production and safeguard access to materials. Production planning is a vital aspect of our work on building stock levels.
"It’s a great thing that we have this ability to work across different departments in the company in order to minimise risks."
As well as regular production, which has to cover our customers’ day-to-day product requirements, we’ve also set up a meticulous stockbuilding plan to ensure we can maintain the same high delivery capacity during the actual move from Nynäshamn to Fors – and indeed for a while afterwards. This is because it’s also essential to build up stocks to support production during a long start-up phase.
One of our challenges has been to understand and predict our customers’ needs during this period, so it’s vital that we have the best planning in place in order to best serve our customers With this in mind, we’ve been working alongside the sales organisation, which has been helping us to analyse the situation with our customers to find out which products we need to stockpile, and in what quantities.
It’s a great thing that we have this ability to work across different departments in the company in order to minimise risks. And thankfully, I can report that everything is going to plan! The only risk I can really see is if there were to be changes in our customers’ requirements that neither they nor we could predict. This is why we have to play on the safe side and build up stocks to cover the period beyond the move itself.
None of our customers should have to worry that they won’t be able to get hold of our products.
