Steelwedge Webinar
Supply Chain Author Paul Dittmann Responds to Your Questions
Note: On Tuesday, June 22, the University of Tennessee and Steelwedge were pleased to feature author and educator Dr. Paul Dittmann in a webinar entitled, “Transforming the Supply Chain Into a Competitive Advantage.” Dittmann is 30-year supply chain veteran and co-author of the recently published book The New Supply Chain Agenda.
Paul’s fascinating presentation is a must-watch for business people wanting to learn the finer points of supply chain strategy and sales & operations planning. Click here to view the session on-demand.
Following the live event, Paul was kind enough to respond to audience questions and you can find his answers below.
(To learn more about Paul Dittmann and the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Demand and Supply Integration Forums, click here.)
What are the key metrics to measure supply chain performance?
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We currently we have an issue related to forecast accuracy. The sales team creates a forecast based on the budget, even when they know the number that they put in forecast is not achievable. Is there a way to solve or accommodate this issue?
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Is there a way to unleash a company’s potential when the budget for technology is limited?
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With supply chain being one of the heaviest users of technology within a company, how is it best to balance a single provider versus best of breed for information systems?
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Your survey indicated that in only 48% of companies sales is heavily involved in SIOP. This means that in 52% of companies, sales is not heavily involved. I would be interested to see how successful a “Sales” and Operations Planning Process can be without sales involvement?
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How do you suggest incorporating customers and suppliers into the supply chain strategy?
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S&OP Author Tom Wallace Responds to Your Questions
Note: On Tuesday, May 4, we were pleased to feature author and educator Tom Wallace in a webinar entitled, “Myths, Misunderstandings and Misinformation About S&OP.” Drawing from his decades of experience as a forecasting and sales planning leader, Tom revealed ten myths that can quickly derail an S&OP process and damage corporate performance and profitability.
Tom’s fascinating presentation is a must-watch for business people wanting to master the finer points of Executive S&OP. Click here to view the session on-demand.
If the number of questions that were submitted during the webinar are any indicator, Tom’s presentation certainly got the audience thinking! Tom was kind enough to respond to each of these questions following the live session and you can find his answers below.
(To learn more about Tom Wallace and Executive S&OP, we encourage you to visit www.tfwallace.com and consider picking up his book Sales and Operations Planning: The How-To Handbook, 3rd Edition.)
How to Launch Executive S&OP
Webinar Participant: Where do you start on creating an Executive S&OP?
Tom Wallace: With top management agreement to do a 90-day live pilot. (How-To Handbook, Third Edition, Pages 75-80.)
Webinar Participant: What is the best way to convince the team to attend the meeting and to express how important they are to the entire process?
Tom Wallace: Get top management to convince them. Seriously, if the leader of the business and his or her staff are truly committed to Executive S&OP, most of them will willingly go through the learning process and do their parts.
Webinar Participant: I work with small and midsized manufacturing companies. It is hard enough selling them on Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP). Where do we start to get them to understand S&OP?
Tom Wallace: Conduct an executive briefing. Get a decision from top management to do a 90-day live pilot. Then, if that looks good to them, and it almost always does, proceed to cut over the rest of the families to Executive S&OP. (How-To Handbook, 3rd Edition, Pages 69-73)
Webinar Participant: Based on the myths of a company not willing to change for S&OP and education being the solution, what’s the best way to teach your executives and what material do you show them?
Tom Wallace: I’ve mentioned the Executive Briefing, and that’s by far the best way to get started. However, they’ll need more input than that and there are a substantial number of books and videos to help you with that at www.tfwallace.com.
Webinar Participant: How do you handle a pilot program when compromise may often include items or pieces (demand or resource constraints) outside of that pilot?
Tom Wallace: If possible, select as your pilot family one with little or no shared resources. If you can’t avoid that, then estimate the impact of the “outside the family” demand to show an approximation of the full picture on the resource.
Webinar Participant: Does Tom have a perspective on implementing S&OP in a services / distribution environment versus traditional manufacturing?
Tom Wallace: it’s more similar than different. The basics are the same: demand, supply and the related financials. (How-To Handbook, Third Edition, Page 166-167) › Continue reading
Lora Cecere on the SAP Insider Event: Where is SAP APO headed?
Those following Supply Chain Industry Analyst Lora Cecere’s new Supply Chain Shaman blog (http://www.supplychainshaman.com) have read with keen interest her observations about SAP’s progress in the area of Supply Chain Planning. Lora points out that while SAP has made tremendous progress in many areas it is also struggling with integrating its many components – specifically Lora says that the “integration of business intelligence and performance management is moving [too] slowly.” Her notes on the growing disappointment with SAP APO – from within and outside the SAP organization – are also worth noting (http://www.supplychainshaman.com/2010/04/inside-insider:
“I leave the event with two major disappointments. The first is that the integration of business intelligence and performance management is moving slowly. …too slowly for this curmudgeon analyst. I was hoping to see the results of the Teradata/SAP Business Objects integration and the launch of a new generation of predictive analytics. While there is some progress in Performance Management, it is largely traditional reporting/dashboards.
The second is that SAP APO—SAP’s supply chain planning suite—was largely business as usual. At the event, I saw small, incremental changes, but no major innovation like I saw in MII, PLM and transportation management. I keep crossing my fingers. I would love to see SAP have the courage to blow up APO and start again. Who knows if it works for PLM, maybe there is a chance to bring innovation to a solution — and the larger Supply Chain Planning (SCP) market– that sorely needs to be redefined.”
As SAP friends and partners know, SAP has some truly outstanding employees and the SCM Product Group continues under the brilliant leadership of Lori Mitchell-Keller. Yet, overcoming legacy products and dated, mis-guided inertia is difficult for even the most effective of executives. The great news is that a whole new generation of cloud-based supply chain planning and S&OP applications that integrate tightly into the SAP suite are now available. These applications are changing the game and will ensure that SAP users are well supported well into the next generation or whenever it is that SAP is finally able to overcome its legacy and move forward.
Tiger Woods, S&OP and Elephants
As Tiger Woods s
lowly recedes from visibility in today’s fast paced, polyphonic, multi-media environment, I am driven to identify some sort of meaning in it all. And, in a world in which bits, bytes and terabytes of data stream before us daily this is no easy task. Living in an age when global conflict shares a table with global social networking, creating personal connections has become the Holy Grail. On occasion connections do occur. When this happens the information that fog my life temporarily lifts. So, ending a long day immersed in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), I ponder — do S&OP, Tiger Woods and Elephants share something in common?
At its best, a highly collaborative, data-driven Sales and Operations Planning process creates visibility. The consequences of bad choice become clear. And, elephants sitting in the room – or perhaps obsolescent inventory lying in a warehouse – cannot be avoided. In good S&OP scenarios are created, alternatives examined, and the path forward is understood. Often, the process of S&OP itself surfaces important issues that might otherwise have been missed. Were there early indications of bad choice in Tiger Wood’s behavior? Was his life story of discipline and perfection to good to be true? Was there an elephant in the room all along that we were all ignoring?
We all love a hero. And of course, we seek to avoid unpleasant experience. While the world worshipped Tiger, Tiger was spending his energy struggling to contain a boiling maelstrom of problems. There indeed was an elephant in Tiger’s room and neither he nor the rest of the world was willing to confront this painful fact until the elephant crashed through the house. The good news is that life will go on for the rest of us and Tiger will survive the storm.
However, in today’s troubled economy, corporate executives cannot afford to ignore the elephant’s in the room. There is no room for bad choice. Constant vigilance and decisive action are imperative. Sales and Operations Planning is a process that can elucidate the elephant in the room. Moreover, Steelwedge S&OP drives better decision making and good choice. Did a major customer in a remote region of the world just cancel a major order? If so, how should we react? Should we discount aging inventory before promoting new products? Can we improve profitability with a different price structure? The answer to these questions is the fuel that powers successful corporate governance. And, indeed the story of Tiger Woods, Elephants and S&OP provides an important message.
Steelwedge Software, Inc. Named to Software Magazine’s 27th Annual Software 500
Steelwedge Software Inc., the leading provider of software-as-a-service Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, today announced that it was named one of the top 500 software companies. This year’s inclusion in the Software 500 marks the third straight year Steelwedge Software, Inc. has been ranked.
“The 2009 Software 500 results show that revenue growth in the software and services industry was healthy, with total Software 500 revenue of $491.3 billion worldwide for 2008 representing 8.8 percent growth from the previous year,” said John P. Desmond, editor of Software Magazine and Softwaremag.com.
“The Software 500 helps CIOs, senior IT managers and IT staff research and create the short list of business partners,” Desmond says. “It is a quick reference of vendor viability. And the online version to be posted soon at www.Softwaremag.com is searchable by category, making it what we call the online catalog to enterprise software.”
“Our continued growth is further validation that our customers experience substantial business benefits from the Steelwedge S&OP solution,” said Glen Margolis, CEO and founder of Steelwedge Software, Inc. “We will continue to innovate and provide our customers with the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions they need to increase their revenue and competitive advantage.”
The Software 500 is a revenue-based ranking of the world’s largest software and services suppliers targeting medium to large enterprises, their IT professionals, software developers and business managers involved in software and services purchasing.
The ranking is based on total worldwide software and services revenue. This includes revenue from software licenses, maintenance and support, training and software-related services and consulting. The financial information was gathered by a survey prepared by King Content Co. and posted at www.Softwaremag.com, as well as from public documents.
Does Toyota Need to Forecast? When Lean Manufacturing Doesn’t Work
The relationship between sales forecasting, demand planning, and lean principles has been analyzed, evaluated, and debated for decades. However, in light of recent market volatility, this debate is final reaching resolution – executives overseeing even the most lean, JIT-focused supply chains, need to planning.
Chris Chiappinelli, a blogger associated with the Managing Automation Blog offers the following :
“Just in Time, in its purest form, is a thing of beauty. Read Toyota’s description of it on their website — it sounds like poetry in motion. But the marketplace doesn’t care for poetry. We don’t want to place our order and watch the gears — perfectly meshed though they may be — smoothly churn out our product. We want our hamburgers pre-cooked and waiting for us under a heat lamp. In that world, Just-in-Time has no place. It’s a museum piece, a relic of a more patient era. In this world of pre-heated hamburgers and mass customization, Toyota and its counterparts are forced to produce not to actual demand, but to expected demand. And that, my friends, not only belies JIT; it creates a huge amount of risk.”
“A New York Times article illustrates just how far from its roots Toyota strayed:Previously, plants operated under the sales force’s direction of “you make them, we will sell them,” said Real C. Tanguay, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. Now the philosophy is, “if we can sell them, then you will make them,” he said.” “Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Who would have predicted that a Toyota executive would ever sum up the company’s philosophy as, “You make them, we will sell them”?”
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Steelwedge enables customers to better understand and anticipate demand through forecasting, collaborative engagement of field sales, and analysis of changes in sales pipeline opportunities. In today’s world, these are vital processes.
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