Steelwedge Software

S&OP (sales and operaitons Planning) has been around for a  long time.  So has ERP.   However, only now has technology been developed that quickly, easily, and cost-effectively automate and power an S&OP process that integrates all information sources while driving collaboration.  Key elements to a true “closed-loop” Sales and Operations Planning process include the capability to create demand scenarios, constrain them in real-time based on actual material, resource and supplier limitations, and then identify the optimal S&OP plan.    ICON Solutions, GMBH and Steelwedge Software, Inc. have developed the first solution that meets the requirement for effective closed-looop sales and operations planning.  This solution has been proven at leading companies such as Honeywell. 

The new offering makes it possible for companies to accomplish the goal of balancing supply with demand, collaborating on plans, and establishing executive S&OP plans with an ease never before possible.

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With the growing recognition of the fundamental importance and value of adopting and effective S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) process, SAP customers are increasingly looking to Steelwedge as the only solution available that can drive an automated S&OP process that rapidly integrates SAP, Salesforce.com, and other key data.   Joint SAP Steelwedge customers include Honeywell, Nvidia, Harley Davidson, and Spansion.

 With the failure of the SAP S&OP xAPP and the lack of a viable solution for S&OP inside SAP APO, SAP users face difficult challenges in leveraging their investments to enable a truly effective, fact-based process.  Moreover, users of financial performance management (FPM) systems such as SAP Outlooksoft, Hyperion, or Cognos, are adopting Steelwedge S&OP as the onel solution that truly ties together financial, operational, and sales information to create an integrated Sales and Operations Plan.   In addition, companies are increasingly asking Steelwedge to bridge information provided by demand planning, demand forecasting, supply planning, APS and other systems.

 The Steelwedge approach is to incorporate existing demand, new product, sales, and financial information in a normalized (single view) way such that information is bridged, users can override plans based on their specific view/role inside an organzation.

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Leading companies are increasingly using external partner collaboration to improve value chain performance.  As a result of enthusiasm around trading partner collaboration, an industry standard was adopted and implemented by industry leaders during the 1990’s. It was called Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR).

CPFR was originally a vision of WalMart in the mid 1990s. The basic principle says that if a more accurate forecast of demand is created and replenishment is executed using this more accurate collaborative demand forecast, then significant costs can be removed from the value chain without impacting service levels.  The CPFR vision also said that, to have the most accurate forecast, everyone should have access and visibility to a single forecast number so all links in the value chain can contribute their knowledge of causal factors in which to collaborate and update the forecast to be more accurate.

However, the state of the art in regard to information systems to support CPFR was abysmal.  Corporation were struggling to get new ERP systems up and running, data integrity was horrible, and IT bandwidth non-existent.  So, the CPFR vision was never fully realized.

Fast forward to 2008.  Eight years since Y2K – the now infamous IT bogey…  Today, systems have matured while hosted (OnDemand or SaaS) CPFR solutions are available that offer high security, data validation, and span corporate firewalls.   For Steelwedge, CPFR has become yet another element in its rapidly growing toolset of solutions (which includes collaborative forecasting, sale and operations planning S&OP, demand planning, supply planning).  This toolset supports the integrated business planning requirements of companies facing intense global competition.  CPFR is no longer a vision but rather an imperative. 

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Oracle and SAP have try to offer S&OP solutions on an on-again off-again basis for many years.   Oracle first tried to build, then acquired solutions in an attempt to solve this mission-critical business problem.   However, they have still not been successful which is why Oracle customers continue to invest in Steelwedge.  Why?  For one, S&OP is a challenging problem that requires the kind of technical and business sophistication that is just not the forte’ of end-to-end suite mega-vendors.  It’s not just software.  Moreoever, it is inevitable that S&OP requires cross-integration with a variety of external legacy and packaged applications - never a forte’ of ERP vendors.

 While the same challenges apply to SAP, SAP’s initial effort to solve this problem failed because of an overly technical focus, lack of a big picture view of the world, and the adoption of a clunky, overly complex solution that proved to expensive to use and presumed heavy investment in background infrastructure.

 So where are we today?  The need to bridge sales and operations is larger than ever, the number of initiatives is growing rapidly, and yet one can easily name the number of vendors in one hand.

The road ahead will most certainly need to be on the kind of SOA-based, open, flexible, and highly configurable MDA (model driven architecture that is the basis for Steelwedge.

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