The question as to whether the process must be defined before a system is installed is frequently asked. The traditional answer was that the process needs to be clearly defined before any system is installed. This advice is based on a long legacy of experience implementing ERP, traditional SCM, and CRM systems. However, S&OP solutions are a new and unique animal — fundamentally they are automating a process, driving collaboration, and pulling together disparate sources of data. This unique category of application demands a different approach — Technology-enabled process automation.
Today’s S&OP systems such as the Steelwedge solution are designed to enable process automation or design. Trade-offs in regard to the timing, level of detail, and steps in a process are often dictated by the availability of data, the timing and sequencing of various systems and activities, and many other details which can only be resolved in the context of the S&OP solution driving the S&OP process.
How scalable is your S&OP solution? For global fortune 500 manufacturing companies, as business complexity increases with trends towards outsourcing, shorter product life cycles, product prolifereation and demand and supply uncertainty, the need for a highly scalable S&OP process becomes more critical. Creating a linkage between a companies business strategy and operational decisions requires not only planning at the aggreaget level but also at a more detailed level. Detailed level planning involvesplanning at an SKU/Account/location level, a shift from monthly buckets to weekly and daily buckets, and the analysis of POS data in addition to orders. THe data volume required to support an S&OP solution for a global fortune 500 manufacturer can easily exceed 500 GB. Traditional solutions and architectures do not provide an adequate level of performance to accomodate large data volumes. ETL load times, search and overrides exceed the acceptable perfomance that companies expect.
The joint solution between Steelwedge and Teradata is the only solution designed to provide a comprehensive S&OP solution designed for global fortune 500 manufacturing companies.
Are there any alternatives?
With Microsoft acquiring Yahoo and headed for a showdown with the world’s largest software company, what next? Clearly, online marketing is now mainstream. Consolidation is happening. Sales planning now must include feedback-driven click-through inputs. Online advertising and search has become the domain of not just consumer companies, but also B2B companies. And, no B2B company can avoid online market feedback, engagement, lead generation, and marketing.
What does all this mean and how does it possibly relate to corporate S&OP? Time is moving quicker, latency is being reduced, the cost of market feedback is lower, the imperative of effective demand forecasting and supply planning is now higher than at any point since the industrial revolution began.
What do you think?
