Author Archives: Glen Margolis

Steelwedge Closes the Agility Gap With New Mobile, Analytics and Big Data Capabilities

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I’m excited to announce today that Steelwedge has launched the latest version of our sales and operations planning (S&OP) platform. This new release addresses the growing complexity and volatility that manufacturers are facing, and is designed to help them respond to these challenges with greater agility and intelligence.

Here are a few examples from our customer base that crystallize the kind of planning complexity that we are working to help address with our solution:

• The VP of Sales at a leading European automotive manufacturer needs to respond to a sudden devaluation of the Japanese Yen and regular fluctuations in the Euro.

What will the impact of these changes be on your margin? Should you adjust pricing or re-orient your sales force?  How do you sift through the explosion of information to make a decision? 

• The VP of Operations for a North American consumer electronics company is confronted by the rapid increase in the cost of components from China and disruptions in key parts sourced from Japan.

How do you respond? What is the impact on the bottom line?

Our new release works to solve these kinds of challenges in three ways:

Manage enormous data sets effectively. Making the right decisions for your business requires the processing of data at a scale not imaginable just a few years ago. Steelwedge has made major investments in new, disruptive technologies that enable us to leverage the unique scalability of the cloud to support Big Data requirements—and faster performance—like never before. 

Support rapidly changing business conditions. Our new S&OP Open Apps Architecture enables you to develop your own applications while leveraging Steelwedge planning data. Furthermore, it gives you access to great S&OP Apps created by others. Also, Steelwedge is the only company in the industry to now offer automatic upgrades. Once you have implemented Steelwedge, you will receive the benefits of every new technological development, feature and function without ever disrupting your ongoing operations.

Access insight on exceptions in your plans. The Steelwedge S&OP Insight planning analytics engine delivers fast analysis of your changing business—on an iPad, the web or through Excel. Changes in a plan don’t wait for days, or even hours. Neither should you. The Steelwedge planning analytics engine delivers insights and identifies exceptions in minutes.

Click here for a full set of resources on today’s news. I’m proud of the Steelwedge team that put tremendous thought leadership and thousands of man hours into this new product release. We’re committed to continue to deliver powerful cloud-based solutions for better agility in your business.

Why S&OP Belongs in the Cloud

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sales and operations planning softwareHurricanes and tsunamis. Diverse and aggressive competition. Volatile financial markets. Fickle consumers. Uncertainty is clearly the new norm.

Gone are the days of rigid business plans and fine-tuned demand forecasts. Today’s businesses need unprecedented organizational agility to quickly recognize, recalibrate and respond to shifting demand in the face of volatility.

Integrated business planning (IBP) – the next phase of S&OP maturity – aligns sales, operations, finance and other functional areas into a single line of sight, from plan to performance to profit. But how do you achieve the accessibility, collaboration and immediacy needed to act on a unified planning view at the speed of business?

The answer lies in the cloud.

According to Gartner, cloud computing-based solutions, across S&OP and all of supply chain management, are quickly becoming the requirement. Case in point: integrated business planning. IBP requires that executives (and systems) across functional areas – e.g. sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, manufacturing, finance– have the tools and processes to work together. Only a cloud-based platform can quickly deliver on this promise, and here are four reasons why.

#1 Executive Buy-In

IBP requires a connected, collaborative view of S&OP processes across the enterprise to answer pivotal questions, such as the variance between revenue forecast, budget and compensation target by service line; or expected quarterly revenue by business unit. The lynchpin to this connected approach is executive buy-in from all functional areas. Many cloud solutions today allow you to quickly prototype micro applications. This ‘try before you buy’ approach offers a no-risk, hands-on evaluation that can help prove the system’s value and break down resistance to change.

#2 Any Time, Anywhere Access

To truly engage today’s professionals in the process, you need a platform-neutral approach that works on both enterprise and modern mobile platforms, inside and outside of your corporate network. With the cloud, you can leverage existing system investments and easily merge multiple data sources – whether it’s from legacy on-premise ERP, CRM or finance applications or with Software as a Service applications like Salesforce.com – and deliver them on demand to anyone in your organization, anywhere in the world.

#3 S&OP Ecosystem Connectivity

Organizations are dealing with increasing variety and volumes of “big data” coming from internal, partner, customer and social sources. For S&OP, the big data management requirement is exacerbated by the need to look at revenue, product, SKU and component information across a variety of geographies, operating divisions and time horizons, and then roll up that data for review at quarterly, monthly and even weekly increments. This, in turn requires a significant boost in processing power and analytics to make sense of the data for faster decision-making.

Connecting all of this data into planning and understanding how shifts in supply and demand will impact operations calls for scalability and flexibility that traditional on-premise solutions can’t deliver from one platform. With a single IBP platform in the cloud, you ensure a level of always-on elasticity to meet your data demands as they grow. Plus, the cloud’s pay as you go model enables you to scale as your business demands, not as your procurement dictates.

#4 Predictive Analytics

Not only is processing power important for developing actionable plans based on vast amounts of input data, but it’s a critical consideration to allow for contingency planning – a key driver for agility, and the heart of true IBP. Strategic, “what if” scenario modeling enables you to explore a myriad of business scenarios that impact the bottom line. Creating ad-hoc modeling to understand not only supply/demand trade-offs, but also the customer and financial implications of those moves would be cost-prohibitive without the elastic computing power of the cloud.

Final Thoughts

With the shift away from traditional annual or quarterly calendars, S&OP conversations and technologies need to be different. The cloud provides an ideal foundation for modern business plan decision making, allowing you to sense for signals of change and take a tighter look at interdependencies that impact departmental and corporate processes.

 

Agility Redefined: When S&OP Meets Big Data

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Glen Margolis, CEONow that the world’s most sophisticated  companies have started to leverage the big data created by maturing S&OP processes to make better decisions, is S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) finally coming of age?

A global high tech equipment manufacturer leverages the huge repository of data built on a year of S and OP plan archives to identify subtle emerging customer buying trends. A European consumer products giant taps into its giant S and OP data set to quickly adapt to weather driven supply disruptions. Continue reading →

European Austerity, Greek Elections, Planning… and the passing of Maurice Sendak

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The Europeans are struggling sideways, the American’s muddling onward … and Maurice Sendak has passed on.  So, where are the wild things?  Agility is about adaption.  In Maurice’s iconic book, Where the Wild Things Are, a naughty boy embarks on an odyssey across the sea to a land where he encounters wild monsters and enters into a giant rumpus.  Does this sound familiar?  Escaping from a recession, the US Economy undertook a journey across the void into a land of unmitigated mortgages followed by a rumpus of real estate speculation.  A few years later, the ever proud Europeans thinking themselves above the fray, promptly joined the rumpus.   Continue reading →

The Titanic and S&OP: Are We Condemned to Repeat History?

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Glen Margolis
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,”
George Santayana, 1905

This coming Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic and a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece from Roger Cohen articulates how the ship’s captain Edward Smith and his elite passengers peacefully cruised the Atlantic in total luxury—completely oblivious to their coming fate. It turned out that the upper class passengers of the Titantic were not only unaware of their immediate destiny but also completely in the dark about the dawning of a new era – a period of profound darkness that spanned the Bolshevik revolution, WWI, the Great Depression and WWII.

HMS TitanicIn Cohen’s piece, he compares that era to today and asks if history is repeating itself once again. Were we happily floating through the post-Cold War “Peace Dividend”, a never-ending housing boom and the enormous growth in luxury goods before 9/11 suddenly struck? And then the Iraq and Afghan wars. And then the Financial Crisis. And what next? Maybe global climate change? Perhaps peace and prosperity?

So what does this have to do with sales and operations planning (S&OP)? Just replace the word “ship” with “supply chain” in the following quote:

“I cannot imagine any condition which would cause this ship to founder. I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern ship building has gone beyond that.” Captain Edward Smith, RMS Titantic, 1912

Many companies found themselves in this very situation earlier this decade and when their ship started sinking, they found that they have no choice but to change. To paraphrase a Steelwedge customer and senior executive at one of the world’s largest manufacturers of industrial equipment:

“The world is becoming a very unpredictable place. We needed to be able to react very quickly and respond to unexpected events. We must be prepared for demand changes like the Financial crisis, or the supply constraints that occurred when suppliers in Japan were devastated by the Tsunami and earthquake and when a plant in Southeast Asia was disrupted by flooding.”

While history teaches us a seemingly obvious lesson – that the future is not predictable, it also teaches us that those who are agile will adapt and thrive. Are you prepared for the unexpected?