Yearly Archives: 2008

S&OP Managed Services

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Managed ServicesAchieving business success requires a balance of people, process and technology. In the world of sales and operations planning (S&OP), we see innovative ways to achieve these goals without adding head count and expensive infrastructure. ‘Managed Services’ can take on some exciting new forms.

Technology: Software-as-a-Service has grown exponentially during the past 5 years. Companies that protected their data from any possible outside visibility are now trusting third party providers to manage their data. Steelwedge continues to host client solutions and has migrated clients away from on-premise to on-demand environments. The chief benefits include reduced IT support costs, staying up to date with the latest release and experts who know our systems backwards and forwards.

Process: Consulting services typically are viewed as one-time project engagements rather than on-going managed services. Yet, there is merit in looking at process from a continuous improvement perspective. Strategic resources, experts in their fields, can provide key insights and business direction advice over an extended period. S&OP covers such a wide array of business functions that having an S&OP champion is imperative. That S&OP champion may very well be an expert, managed services professional.

People: Is there somebody out there that has the knowledge and experience to help my business meet its goals without hiring additional headcount? A managed services approach may be just the answer. With managed services, a specific business function responsibility is transferred to a strategic partner. That partner brings a critical skill set to meet the targeted area of need.

Widely used in areas of Information and Communication Services, managed services has lagged in areas of sales and operations planning (S&OP), forecasting, demand planning, supply planning and inventory management. Most often, companies have viewed their information as too sensitive to share with outsiders or that outsiders do not have enough understanding of our business to step in and help. Times have changed. Information is managed externally through partners and the door has opened for strategic services.

Steelwedge is driving change in the world of collaborative planning. Managed services is one of the tools we use to assist our customers in meeting their business goals.

Juniper Networks deploys Steelwedge OnDemand for S&OP

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Steelwedge Software, the innovator in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, announced today that Juniper Networks (NASDAQ:JNPR) has adopted the Steelwedge OnDemand (Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) solution as the platform for a global S&OP process to leverage its investment in Oracle/Siebel ERP and CRM systems.

The Steelwedge OnDemand solution supports Juniper’s global requirements to reduce the total cost of ownership, leverage new technology available to support contract manufacturer collaboration and demand planning and expand support for revenue and margin analysis of demand and supply balancing as part of the S&OP process.

“Juniper has used Steelwedge solutions to improve sales forecast accuracy for its complex, configured products,” said Steelwedge CEO Glen Margolis, “And now Juniper is expanding its adoption of Steelwedge across other Business Groups to automate their integrated business planning and S&OP processes.”

Juniper Networks is the leader in high-performance networking. Juniper offers a high-performance network infrastructure that creates a responsive and trusted environment for accelerating the deployment of services and applications over a single network.

“Steelwedge has been a key business partner for five years and supports our complex product configurations and our ability to expand the existing model for our business,” said Barry Hills, vice president of Operational Excellence at Juniper Networks.  “As we began to implement our new S&OP strategy, we turned to Steelwedge’s OnDemand solution to meet our business critical objectives.”

Using Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) to Manage through Uncertain, Recessionary Times

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With rapidly increasing frequency, customers and prospects are asking us for assistance in improving their S&OP process.  When we ask the question “why now?” the answer is consistent – in a supply contrained world – balancing suppy and demand and reviewing business strategy were not central issues.

In a world of volatile demand and unpredictable margins, however, S&OP planning moves to the forefront.

For example, Steelwedge (www.steelwedge.com) is currently working with a leading alternative energy production company.  Until last month, they were confident that demand would far outstrip supply and therefore did not place any emphasis on strategic intiatives for managing supply-demand gaps.   In the new world they are anticipating a rapid swing to excess supply.  Suddenly, the institutionalization of a disciplined sales and operations planing process that drives integrated business planning has become mission critical.

Prior to the recent shift in the supply-demand balance, their focus was exclusively on eliminating supply bottlenecks and improving production quality.  Today, however, the focus is necessarily on understanding and anticipating demand patterns and tightly managing the associated inventory bets.  Eliminating latency out of their planning process is essential.  Their current planning process is limited to a few individuals downloading data from various systems and creating a build plan after six weeks of number crunching.  There future, with the assistance of Steelwedge, is the creation of a monthly sales and operations planning process that harnesses real-time data and is updated daily on an exception basis.

This new approach will enable them to manage the demand shocks, supply concerns, and frequent surprises endemic to today’s world.

How is your company managing in these unpredictable times?  Have you eliminated all informatoin latencies?  Are you collecting and collating all relevant supply and demand information?  Do decision makers have visiblity into detail level exceptions and aggregate level signals?  Is strategy aligned with opeational tactics?  Are you leveraging operational performance management information to create accountability and flexiblity?

How to Choose S&OP Software (Sales and Operations Planning Software)

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AMR and Gartner have both recently documented the fact that global manufacturing companies using SAP or Oracle are increasingly choosing Steelwedge as their S&OP software.  The Steelwedge Sales and Operations Planning software solution is offered as Software as a Service (SaaS) as well as for on-premise deployment.  Steelwedge’s newest offering is a full BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) approach whereby Steelwedge S&OP software is c ombined with Steelwedge Strategic Services and Steelwedge Professional Services to offer a holistic, integrated approach to S&OP that combines best practice approaches with leading-edge software and deep domain expertise to shorten the investment payback period and drive a higher ROI,  more quickly.

SAP Customers Selecting Steelwedge Software to Meet their Sales and Operations Planning Needs

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Leading SAP customers are increasingly selecting Steelwedge to meet their business planning needs — citing that Steelwedge is the easiest-to-use, quickest-to-implement, and most powerful S&OP and performance management solution available. They state that only Steelwedge offers the flexibility, functionality, agility and power they require. Steelwedge was also recently named as the leading provider of dedicated S&OP solutions by analyst firms AMR and Gartner.

SAP customers using Steelwedge to meet their sales forecasting, operational planning and Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) requirements include Honeywell, Hewlett Packard, Harley-Davidson, Nvidia and Spansion. “Steelwedge offers breakthrough technology that overcomes the planning challenges created by the growth of disparate, departmental data sources and the lack of formal planning processes.” said Glen Margolis, CEO of Steelwedge Software. “The collaborative planning model and Netweaver-compliant technology stack offered by Steelwedge solves these evolving challenges for the first time through its elegant and easy-to-use solution.”

The Steelwedge Sales Planning and Performance Management solution bridges the gap between sales pipeline opportunities and demand planning processes, incorporating market intelligence into the consensus demand forecasting and S&OP process. In addition, it allows executive management to improve planning processes through best-practice workflows, performance management, and product configuration planning tools.

“ERP companies have failed to provide practical solutions for sales planning and performance management,” said Steelwedge CEO Glen Margolis. “With each passing day, more SAP and Oracle customers are currently evaluating, implementing or using Steelwedge collaborative sales forecasting and sales & operations planning (S&OP) capabilities.”