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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.
Sphere: Related ContentDoes 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.
Sphere: Related ContentSteelwedge Partners with S&OP Guru to Provide Training
For any readers not already aware of our exciting new partnership with the world leading expert on S&OP — Tom Wallace – below is today’s release describing the details. Tom previously worked with SAP and is very excited about joining forces with Steelwedge to offer the industry’s leading integrated planning solution
Steelwedge and Tom Wallace have entered a Strategic Partnership to provide an integrated solution offering of Education, Training and Software for Executives. As a kick-off for the partnership, Steelwedge is featuring Tom Wallace, in the first of a Webinar series on Executive S&OP Best Practices titled, “Executive S&OP: Surviving the Recession, Preparing for the Upturn.”
The strategic partnership of Steelwedge and Tom Wallace combines two industry leading companies specializing in Executive S&OP. Tom Wallace has a proven track record of helping companies successfully implement Executive S&OP through delivering education, training materials and books, while Steelwedge has built a reputation among customers and industry analyst as the Leading “Pure Play” S&OP software provider.
As partners, Steelwedge will integrate training and education materials developed by Wallace into its standard implementation methodology and Wallace will periodically review and provide input around the Steelwedge product roadmap and direction. Additionally, Steelwedge and Wallace will conduct a Webinar Series on Executive S&OP Best Practices.
The joint webinar series kick-off on March 31, 2009 will help companies and executives who are looking for answers to the question “How can Executive S&OP help me survive the downturn and prepare for the upturn?”. Webinar attendees will benefit from hearing Tom Wallace’s views and lessons learned from his decades of experience as a thought leader in the area of Sales and Operations Planning. In addition, Steelwedge will share how its customers are leveraging its software to survive the recession and prepare for the upturn.
According to Steelwedge Software CEO, Glen Margolis, “Companies seeking to adopt best-practices for Executive S&OP processes will benefit greatly from our partnership with Tom Wallace. Bridging the gap between detailed functional supply chain planning processes and applications with more strategic finance related planning processes remains a white space for many organizations. Successfully implementing Executive S&OP requires a comprehensive approach including strategic, process, technology, performance management and change management components. Our partnership provides expertise across all critical areas needed to successfully implement S&OP, combined with best practices, deep experience, training programs, educational materials, and practical expertise.”
March 31, 2009 ‘Executive S&OP: Surviving the Recession, Preparing for the Upturn”
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Why can’t I use our Financial Planning System for S&OP?
Why can’t my financial planning system be used for Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)? This is a question I am asked regularly…
It is also the reason why various providers of financial planning solutions have recently partnered with Steelwedge.
The easiest answer is to speak with an organization that has tried to solve S&OP with a financial planning tool. In a few words, it doesn’t work!
But why? The fundamental answer to this question lies in the architectual foundation of an application such as Steelwedge. The functional answer is manifest in the out-of-the-box standard functionality offered by executive S&OP applications but not offered in financial planning applications. Highlighted below are three key of the elements to an S&OP system that don’t exist in budgeting, financial, business planning and consolidation applications:
1. High Performance Architecture – S&OP applications must have the capability to handle bottoms-up, top-down aggregation on-the-fly as part of the native planning process – this often translates into the need to perform complex calculations involving attribute and hierarchy-specific revenue to unit translations at a very detailed level and then rolling up the answer – the net result is the need for a performance-focused database architecture that can perform millions of details and billions of calculations in a matters of seconds.
Simply put, this is not something that high-level, dollar-based financial planning applications- even when supercharged – were ever designed to handle.
2. Support for complex algorithms to handle statistical forecasting, product mix management, attach-rate forecasting, independent-dependent demand management, and bill of materials (BOM) translation.
No financial planning system incorporates the kind of deep operational expertise required to support this requirement. While any application – with enough man-years of effort – can be programmed to do just about anything – it is simply not practical to replicate the knowledge, best practices, complex algorithms, standardized workflows, and off-the-shelf performance metrics built into any robust S&OP application.
3. A constraints-based supply planning engine that can perform rough cut capacity analysis, support supply-demand balancing, manage inventory netting, trade planning elastisticy analysis, and the operational optimization of S&OP supply-demand scenarios. This is core funtionality for Steelwedge but is not built into traditional financial planning solutions.
More questions? Comments? Please submit them below!
Sphere: Related ContentIntegrated Business Planning: The Final Frontier for Sales and Operations Planning
We welcome Noha Tohamy of AMR Reaserch on August 26 for our next Best Practice Leardership Forum Web Seminar. Hope you can join us as Noha summarizes the results of the resent study where Steelwedge has been identified as the Pure Play S&OP vendor. For more information and to register simply click the link below.
http://www.steelwedge.com/news/index.php?z=events
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