More challenges face the chemicals industry today than ever before. Globalization, new technologies, shorter product lifecycles, environmental challenges, capacity cuts, and highly volatile demand patterns are forcing manufacturers to adopt agile planning processes and drive efficiencies to a level never before imagined.
In spite of large investments in information technologies over the past decade, large gaps remain between execution-oriented supply planning, ineffective operational planning, and misaligned strategic goals. Rising to today’s challenges requires companies to rapidly resolve these planning challenges, manage through the economic crisis, and drive required efficiencies. In response to these needs, Steelwedge has partnered with Accenture and SAP to create the industry’s only, purpose-built, Executive Sales and Operations Planning solution.
We are extremely excited about the opportunity to assist chemical companies and look forward to making formal announcements regarding this exciting endeavor in the coming months.
The week’s Blog entry is provided courtesy of Christian Smagg, a respected French SaaS expert. Further commentary by Christian can be found at http://www.saastream.com/my_weblog/ Christian’s experience is very simliar to the Steelwedge experience on a daily basis – demand for SaaS appliciations are rising.
As experienced in previous economic downturns, companies that invest smartly during the bad times, emerge quicker, and better equipped to grow faster after the recession. Thinking creatively about how to do more with less is the key to IT innovation during challenging times and allow companies not only to survive but also to seize the extraordinary opportunities that arise during periods of vast uncertainty. When you think about it, creative application of new technologies during weak economies actually gave rise to huge waves of productivity like Software-as-a-Service, Web 2.0 or social networking.
But fear is driving decisions at many companies these days, causing this unhealthy lock-up of budgets. Current miasma should not slow down or prevent companies from innovating and creating value so as to survive, weather the economic storm or even outperform competition.
Financial crises are often having a huge impact on IT departments, resulting in significant increases in business activity, placing greater burden on IT resources and forcing them to find new ways to boost productivity while slashing expenses. At times like these, it is highly recommended that companies seriously consider leveraging applications delivered via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, harnessing the broader value that these solutions can play in not only moving the business forward but moving it beyond the current economic crisis as well.
Indeed, CIOs should take a much closer look at SaaS solutions as a way to avoid significant up-front investments in new software platforms by simply “renting” on-demand applications that would provide added returns where most needed: the top…
S&OP continues to gain visibility among global manufacturing companies as a key process to drive improvements in revenue, profitability, customer service and competitive advantage. Unfortunately, many companies are confused about what it is and where it fits. Executive S&OP is focused on the medium to long term planning horizon based on product family volume versus SKU level unit mix. Engaging executive management in a monthly review for a 1-2 hour meeting requires a more aggregate level of planning to drive strategic level decisions around balancing supply and demand.
The types of decisions addressed in Executive S&OP are as follows:
– How much to increase or decrease plant capacity Should we add or delete operational shifts?
– Do we need to pursue alternative global sources of capacity?
– Does our pre-build inventory strategy support our needs looking out 3 quarters?
– What is the best timing for a major new product introduction?
– How does reducing our capacity by 25% impact Revenue and Margin?
Is it practical for executives to log onto an SAP or Oracle ERP, CRM, Demand Planning, Supply Chain Planning, or Business Intelligence application to get answers to the above questions? Do these applications provide the appropriate level of detail in one solution to support strategic level decisions?
Most enterprises do not have a single application with the appropriate level of detail to support Executive S&OP. The primary application used to support the process is desktop Excel, which has many short comings including: manual data consolidation, lack of security, limited version control…
Steelwedge Software (www.steelwedge.com) is purpose-built for Executive S&OP. The application is designed to consolidate data from multiple applications and provide multi-level aggregate views needed for cross functional collaboration and Executive level decisions. Companies…
