Archive for January, 2008
S&OP “Gurus”
With the coming of age of the field of sales and operations planning, a cadre of experts has risen to promimence. While some of these “experts” are indeed “John-come lately’s” capitalizing on a new trend, others have decades of experience. The opportunities to learn from this small group of specialists who have grappled with S&OP challenges across multiple industries, circumstances and times is enormous. Several sources of expertise exist — academics with active consulting activities and deep practical experience, traditional manufacturing-field experts, and technologists with experience in automation. Of these sources, Steelwedge has found the insights and best practices developed by academics and certain industry consultants to be particularly valuable. Sales and Operations Planning experts Dr. Tom Mentzer and Dr. Kenneth Kahn are two examples from the academic world.
And this month, Steelwedge is pleased to announce its partnership with Tom Wallace, an extremely well known author, academic, and “S&OP Guru.” As part of our association with Tom, he has kindly agreed to lead a Web Seminar on January 22nd on the topic of how to make S&OP work. It’s worth a listen.
Teradata and Steelwedge
Steelwedge announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the global leader in enterprise data warehousing, to incorporate its Sales and Operation Planning solution (S&OP) capabilities to the Teradata Warehouse™ solutions portfolio.
This addition will enable large enterprises, many for the first time, to realize the significant business benefits of Demand-Driven Supply Networks (DDSN).
“Our collaboration with Teradata is a great opportunity to help the large corporate enterprise improve Sales & Operations Planning and corporate performance,” said Steelwedge CEO Glen Margolis. “Teradata is the gold standard in data warehousing and now with Steelwedge S&OP, these large companies will become more agile, productive and profitable.”S&OP continues to be viewed by manufacturing enterprises as a key source of competitive advantage. In a recent survey of 210 companies about supply chain technology strategies conducted by the Aberdeen Group, Sales and Operations Planning ranked among the top three application focus areas for four major industry segments: High-Tech, Discrete, Consumer and Process industries. Steelwedge S&OP is a total solution that supports secure, version-controlled, multiple views of forecasts and plans in a single environment to facilitate collaboration, eliminating uncontrolled spreadsheets and limited point applications from ERP, CRM, APS and BI.
“Even though S&OP excellence is primarily driven by process excellence, having a technology backbone that supports the management of data from multiple sources as well as the ability to leverage the data to manage forecasts across sales, marketing and supply chain is critical. In addition, the solution should support the ability to balance supply and demand based on profitability,” said Nari Viswanathan, Research Director, Supply Chain and Logistics, Aberdeen Group. “Steelwedge and Teradata bring together a practical approach to solving this critical problem.” “As more companies are pursuing demand-driven supply networks to improve performance, there’s a significant need for technology to support the people and process changes that are required for more robust sales and operations planning,” said Michael DeBrosse, Teradata Vice President of Demand and Supply Chain Solutions Marketing. “Steelwedge S&OP is an excellent fit for our portfolio, and a critical component for leading edge supply chain management.”The S&OP software is available immediately for use with the Teradata Warehouse.
2008 — S&OP Comes of Age
In spite of — or perhaps because of — the mortgage debacle, global warming, and threats of recession within the United States, manufacturing executives worldwide are becoming ever more focused on wringing out the last bit of efficiency, reducing waste, and streamlining operations. Because S&OP is a mission critical process for driving efficiencies, we are seeing demand for S&OP solutions increase even more than last year.
Beyond driving efficiency, in 2007 we saw that the maturation of CRM and ERP implementations have left many planners feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. On one hand, more valueable data is available than ever before. On the other hand, planners are increasingly flooded with informatoin requests from Executives, enormous manual data manipulation needs, and data which is often inconsistent or outdated by the time it is “massaged.”
It is for this reason that a new, unique and powerful technology was developed by Steelwedge- one that combines the ease of moden data integration tools with process flow, security protocols and total Excel integration.
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