Effective Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) measurably improves margins. However, historically, S&OP relied on backward-facing shipment data, subjective opinion, and incomplete operational data.  It was overly complex, costly, time-consuming, unreliable and inaccurate.

Now, technology-enabled S&OP processes drive a practical S&OP process, systematically integrating people, processes and data, and restoring confidence in the forecasting and planning processes. Effective technology-enabled S&OP guides participants through a workflow-driven, collaborative process, resulting in a highly accurate aligned forecast and plan that all functions and trading partners can trust. With solutions such as Steelwedge Compass Express S&OP planners can quickly adapt resources to changing conditions, significantly increase margins and dramatically improve revenue predictability. The key is the adoption of a flexible, easy to use, collaborative, and comprehensive solution.

Improve Revenue Visibility

Two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have no formal way of aligning supply and demand based on corporate-wide inputs. Unscientific approaches result in poor focus of organizational resources like capacity, manufacturing, staffing, sales efforts, finance and budgets. The overall Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process suffers in turn. Creating true revenue visibility not only requires strong analytic support, but also the automation of systematic and automated processes for soliciting feedback and creating agreement among multiple parties

Create a Profitable S&OP Plan

Steelwedge empowers executives to evaluate alternate pricing scenarios, product mixes, and configurations. Once the optimum margin forecast scenario has been identified, promotions, product packaging and configuration, and customer targeting decisions can be even further tuned to drive the most profitable demand plan possible. Through participative processes, sales, operations, marketing, and finance are able to work in unison toward a common goal of selling and delivering the most profitable mix of products. The result is enhanced corporate earnings and more efficient…

In today’s highly volatile economic environment, corporate Scenario Planning is more necessary than ever before.  Why is this the case?  Rapid changes in the consumer landscape, gyrating commodities prices, unpredictable capital costs -  even climate change  – mean that executives must be prepared for every possible contingency.   In short – executives must be ready with Plan A, B and C.  While it is no longer possible to predict which plan is most likely to be executed, it is possible to identify the range of possibilities and develop contingent plans accordingly.

Case in point comes from the July 6, 2009 Wall Street Journal article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124683295589397615.html) by Cari Tuna which provides an overview of the key plan options presented at JDSU and the likely impacts of each plan:

“Each spring, executives at JDS Uniphase Corp. plan for three potential sales scenarios for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. Last year, rattled by financial-market turmoil, they included an extremely pessimistic sales outlook and outlined potential cost cuts….The experience highlights the value of scenario planning, or preparing responses to imagined changes in conditions.

“It’s not about predicting the future,” says Peter Schwartz, a partner at Monitor Group, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm. “Scenario planning is a tool for learning” and making better decisions.”

Steelwedge is proud of its role as the acknowledged leading provider of software-as-aservice solutions to enable complex scenario planning.  The Steelwedge Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is unique in its power, flexiblity, and low cost.  Its ability to model top-down, middle-out, bottom up price, cost, demand and supply changes is at the center of this approach.