Category Archives: Integrated Business Planning

Partner Perspectives: Got Agility?

Posted on by
Reply

Partnership, as defined by Wikipedia, is “an arrangement where parties agree to cooperate to advance their mutual interests.”

I believe the fundamental reasons people and organizations establish partnerships, including software vendors and channel partners, have not changed. It’s collaboration for mutual benefit and, most importantly, to drive value for our customers.

Always the pragmatist, I did some research to prove the mutual interests claim. Indeed, I found this to be true. Here are just a few examples for anyone who doubts collaboration in partnership yields mutual reward.

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis: Can’t have a funny guy without his straight man. They took that act to the bank.

Peanut Butter and Jelly: I have had my share of peanut butter sandwiches. I’m pretty sure the addition of jelly to the mix was the basis for the expression 1 plus 1 makes 3.

Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea: Collaboration at its greatest. Partnership between rock star explorers and interpreter/guide extraordinaire opens doors to travel to the Pacific coast. They also brought back information about European dealers connected to global markets. A primitive supply chain in the making!

While motives to partner remain the same, the landscape to do is constantly disrupted by global economic forces, new technologies, big data and this thing called the cloud.

So how do software vendors and partners maintain equilibrium, even thrive, in this volatile environment? Some don’t. Those companies who are unable, or unwilling, to adapt may find themselves “stuck” in an old business model that is no longer in demand.

But agile organizations—VARs, consulting firms and service providers who have stayed in the game by reinventing themselves—will be here for a long, long time. These companies understand the new world of cloud solutions, big data, subscription software and a customer-centric approach to…everything.

They embrace the challenge of migrating an on-premise solution to SaaS. They transform themselves from reseller to full-service provider, or from implementation team to consultant and trusted advisor. They get “social” and understand that it’s not just big data, but what you do with that data. They never stop learning because they know change is coming.

(Shameless plug alert…)

sw partners graphicAnd they align with technology vendors, like Steelwedge, the leading provider of cloud-based integrated business planning (IBP) solutions, who provide them the ideal platform on which to build their business.

I invite you to meet some of our partners here. If you are interested in becoming a Steelwedge partner, or would like more information regarding the Partner Program, fill out this online form.

Thanks for reading. Have an opinion, comment or question? Chime in!

Are You Ready for 5 Stages of S&OP Maturity?

Posted on by
Reply

Two weeks ago, at its annual Supply Chain Executive Conference in Phoenix, Gartner rolled out the latest evolution to its sales and operations planning (S&OP) maturity model. Part of the reason: a majority of manufacturers were getting “stuck” at Stage 2 maturity: balancing supply and demand. Indeed, we hear about this conundrum every day in our sales and consulting engagements. The vast majority of companies use Excel and manual efforts to power their S&OP. While no one ever abandons Excel, those who try to power through maturity with only Excel or a collection of disparate, unconnected solutions, usually hit a brick wall when it comes time to driving collaboration and scale in their plans.

Gartner’s new model attempts to help companies “smooth out” the journey, now with five steps instead of four. It looks at the strategy as a move from inside-out supply driven planning to more outside-in or demand-driven value networks, guided by updated information across multiple touch points from customers and prospects. Gartner has identified 7 key building blocks for IBP: Vision, Strategy, Governance, Organization, Processes, Technology and Performance Management.

At Steelwedge, we’re helping our customers advance their planning maturity with enabling technology to more easily connect, mine and analyze all that data from one platform. Here are a few ways we’re doing that:

1. Planning Analytics

Steelwedge created a single unified data model for global scenario management across the supply, demand and finance as well as extremely rich collaborative capabilities supported by Enterprise-Enabled Excel and online analytics, as well as mobile delivery.

With Insight, you will learn about what you don’t know and determine what to do about it. Through exception based dashboards that analyze planning as well as transaction data, planners and analysts can get near real-time visibility to trends and make proactive decisions.

2. Big Data

The amount of data companies use in their S&OP processes process has grown exponentially in recent years, and that data has become far more granular as a means to define problems. During the past decade, Steelwedge has witnessed its customers go from managing 200-400 total planning points (TPPs) to more than one billion TPPs. To address these challenges, Steelwedge has purpose-built each component of its integrated business planning (IBP) platform to be high-performance. These components are both in the hardware as well as software layer, keeping in mind the turnkey approach of the cloud. Each communication layer in the cloud—network, storage, memory, edge caching and CPUs—are designed for high speed

3. Cloud

Even though cloud was not called out as a specific enabler for IBP at the Gartner event, we continue to believe that it is a game changer. It is our opinion that it is impossible to companies to advance to Stage 5 maturity without a cloud-based solution. For Stage 5, there needs to be a coordinated enterprise and network decision-making capability. There needs to be the ability to quickly on-board partners to the planning process, collaborate in both structured as well as unstructured manners and to do planning in a distributed environment. These capabilities are only provided by a cloud solution.

4. Multi-Enterprise Planning and Orchestration

Cloud-based planning solutions also simplify multi-enterprise planning and orchestration. With such complexity, integrated, single platform solutions are critical. Outsourcing operations has resulted in companies having asset-lite as well as assetless operations where coordination and orchestration becomes the key driver for sales and operations planning rather than asset utilization. In these environments, network-related data is critical to conduct S&OP on both a regular and an ad hoc basis.

5. Enhanced Social

Steelwedge has pioneered an S&OP-specific structured collaboration solution through its One-Click Planning as well as its Enterprise-Enabled Excel platform. Companies are demanding unstructured collaboration as well in today’s highly networked environment. This implies that there needs to be the ability to provide a social layer on top of the current structured collaboration solution.

In summary, the integrated business planning journey need not be like a holy grail quest, if powered with connected process strategy, empowered teams and flexible technology. But it is significantly smoother if the roadmap has holistic components from the beginning.

If you haven’t already seen it, here is the latest Gartner S&OP Maturity model. How far is your company on this journey? Have you hit a brick wall? We’d love to help

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

How Disruptable Are You?

Posted on by
Reply

Like it or not, doing business well is about ensuring you have “shock absorbers” to deal with inevitable disruption to your sales and operations plans.

At Steelwedge, we are laser focused on how we can deploy disruptive technologies and leverage them through our cloud solution, to make supply/demand decision-making remarkably faster with more insightful scenario planning options.   We put disruptive technologies to work so that we can help our customers handle the disruption that is part of doing business in a complex, interdependent work.

This week, JMP Securities announced its annual Top 100 best privately held software companies. We’re delighted that Steelwedge was included in this list—not only for the honor of the award, but also for how JMP framed its key criteria for inclusion:  the ability to drive displacement and growth in the market.

JMP analysts looked at a new generation of SaaS software companies that are opposing and supplanting the older generation of technologies.  They highlighted Plex for manufacturing/ERP, Box for content management, BigMachines for configuring price quotes, and Steelwedge for supply chain. What we all have in common, the passion for changing the status quo and delivering better agility in a disruptable world.

How well does your business handle distruption? We’d love to hear from you.

 

Partner Perspectives: The Shift to the Cloud

Posted on by
Reply

We live in a more complex and interdependent business environment than ever before. Companies large and small must navigate a sea of economic, political and environmental change, and respond to that change without compromising the delicate balance among supply, demand and profitability.

We know that customers work with Steelwedge because our cloud-based integrated business planning (IBP) solutions enable them to plan, perform and profit in a volatile, ever-changing business environment. We also know they work with us because of our people. We recognize that technology is one part of the equation for success, but people and process play a significant role in enabling that technology.

This is precisely why we’ve built a team of the most experienced, capable S&OP professionals and partner with the industry’s best.

A State of Flux

Consolidation, continuous changes in technology, shrinking IT budgets and a host of other forces have left customers, vendors and partners alike in a state of flux. We are seeing rapid adoption and transition to the cloud-based technology with software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and more. As a result, customers demand faster time to value, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and “cloud ready” partners.

As CRN recently reported, channel partners must reinvent themselves as the market shifts from traditional on-premise enterprise software to cloud solutions and services. In the article, Gartner’s Tiffany Bova says, “Innovation by the channel is a must… If you don’t innovate, you probably won’t survive, not because you did anything wrong, but because the market doesn’t need you anymore.”

So the days of simply offering a product to customers are long gone. Customers expect partners to be solution providers who deliver the right technology solution, best practices and ongoing support.

In the cloud.

The message is simple: Partners who don’t adapt will be left behind.

Enter Steelwedge

The Steelwedge Partner Program is built on our 100% cloud-based Integrated Business Planning Platform. Organizations that partner with Steelwedge have the tools, resources and support to expand their footprint, assemble the RIGHT solution for their customers and offer a faster time to value delivery model—all through the cloud.

In the coming weeks and months, you’ll hear a lot more about the new Steelwedge Partner Program and our ecosystem of Alliance, Channel and Technology partners. In the meantime, please click here to learn more.