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.”

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…