What are the best practices in Supply chain and logistics managemenet?

The Best Practice is to run the business using Sales and Operations Planning, on one set of numbers, driven from a forecast for every item sold. On a monthly cycle, forecasts of future demand are run for the coming 18 months, which is  adjusted with market intelligence and new product forecasts and locked as the official Demand Plan for all purposes for the future. This Demand drives the Operations plan like sourcing, capacity planning, labour and materials planning, And then Sales is measured and rewarded on the accuracy of the Demand Plan. Operations is held accountable for executing the agreed Supply Plan. The business has an agreed basis for long-term and near term planning and unit costs go down since operations gets a forward view to optimise capacity.

According to me this is very important to forecast the demand, many companies need to forecast customer demand because their lead time to supply is longer than their customers will typically wait for products. The most common method is to forecast at some aggregate level according to product or geography and then figure out what to send to each store or regional warehouse by essentially making another forecast, This practice can be enhanced by so called 'tournament' forecasting where the computer program tries out a whole range of possible forecast models and picks the best model on the basis of the lowest, without unbiased error.

See SOP ( sales and operational planning) is the input for Forecast and demand Mgmt.There are 3 types fo planning.One is long term planning, second is Medium, third is day to day planning(Operational activities and Production control planning).Long term planning is usually unconstained planning, it doesn't take constaints like resource capacities,transporation, storage et). While medium term planning considers constaints like capacities, transporation and storage). Day to day planning is usually for prouction control and monitoring.