How’s your business engine running? Use Steelwedge Strategic Services to help tune your S&OP process & drive improvements

If you’re like most people, you drive your car nearly every day. You’re very familiar with how to operate your vehicle and navigate your way. But do you know what’s happening under the hood? Can you anticipate problems coming before they actually manifest? For many of us, we entrust experts to maintain and repair our cars to keep us going.

In business, we’re driving hard every day. We depend on people, processes and technology to work seamlessly to deliver desired results. Do we always achieve those results? Sometimes, we fall short. Identifying the shortfall is not the hard part. Discerning ‘why’ and affecting change is the challenge.

Let Steelwedge be your expert mechanic. Leveraging deep domain experience and strong partnerships, Steelwedge brings best practices to life with focus on S&OP, demand planning, forecasting, supply planning and performance measurement. We assess your current state business processes, find potential improvement areas, develop action plans and help you get to where you need to be. We’ll even refill your wiper blade fluid!

Steelwedge strategic services begin with discovery. We focus on four key elements which illuminate current position and point to improvement opportunities.

Benchmarking: We approach each client with eyes wide open. Your business is unique and we want to understand what makes you special. At the same time, there are best practice methodologies that have helped numerous organizations achieve excellent results. We focus on documenting your current practices, results and metrics. These benchmark results and metrics are compared to industry best practices as well as your future results to measure improvement gains.

H2F2 Analysis: The H2F2 approach…

S&OP continues to be the Holy Grail for manufacturing companies pursuing break through financial and operational performance. One of the key requirements for any successful S&OP process is reporting and analytics. While many technologies are available to provide flexible reporting, few applications are available that embrace Out-of-the-Box reporting and dashboards designed specifically for S&OP.

Steelwedge has worked with leading manufacturing companies to develop a rich set of S&OP dashboards, reports and metrics that represent the Best Practices. While certain companies and industries have their own unique reporting requirements for S&OP, the following reporting categories are critical to any successful S&OP Process.

1. Revenue & Margin Tracking

2. Forecast Accuracy

3. Inventory Tracking

4. Customer Service Levels

5. Demand Supply Balancing

Revenue and Margin reports that project into the future and track actuals against plan, are one of the most fundamental reporting requirements for any successful S&OP process. These reports are typically available in a variety of formats that include: quarter-to-date and year-to-date actuals versus targets, year over year comparisons of monthly, quarterly and year-to-date totals, rolling 3 month totals, and cumulative revenue and margin totals versus plan.

Forecast & Accuracy is another key reporting requirement that compares actual demand versus forecast. The most common measure used for measuring forecast accuracy is Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE). In addition, companies measure MAPE at different time lags to track how plans change and accuracy improves over time. Reports that capture planning assumptions at different time lags are commonly referred to as Waterfall Reports. Understanding forecast error over lead time is important in managing risk through the use of safety stock and flexible capacities. Finally, companies also track…