Steelwedge is hitting the road as the spring conference season begins in earnest. We hope to see many of you this month. Let us know in the comments what your conference schedule looks like. Here’s where you can find us in April 2013:
SCOPE Spring: Supply Chain Operations Private Exhibition
April 14-16, 2013, Atlanta
Click here for more information.
Nari Viswanathan, Vice President of Product Marketing and Management at Steelwedge, will present with Tom Wallace, Fellow, Ohio State University’s Center for Operational Excellence. “Global Planning: Whack-a-Mole or Wonderful Opportunity?” is scheduled for April 16, at 10:00 am EDT and will address these questions and opportunities:
- Does global complexity deliver a new challenge each time you solve the last one?
- Is your planning tapping the data explosion in your company?
- If you are doing S&OP, are you using it for “just” supply/demand balance?
- Learn how to go global with smart strategy and scalable technology
- Turn your big data into big insights
- Build an agile enterprise: Outmaneuver volatility
Steelwedge will also be exhibiting at SCOPE in Booth #412. Stop by to see us!
S&OP for High-Tech Summit
April 16-17, 2013, San Francisco
Click here for more information.
EJ Tavella, Steelwedge’s Vice President, Strategic Solutions, will present “Putting Your S&OP Data to Work: Beyond the Supply Chain” on April 16 at 12:30 pm PDT. In his presentation, he will discuss the following:
Effective S&OP is all about synch. Bringing the right people and processes together for 
smart decision making. At the center of this equation is data: demand data, risk data, pricing data, costing data, inventory data, new product data, etc. If you’ve done it right, your S&OP initiative has given you a goldmine of data that should be enabling executives in and out of your S&OP team to gain insight for planned and on-the-fly decision making…across so much more than supply chain.
What is your planning data telling you? If it’s not able to answer the following types of questions, you are selling your business short:
-How is our sales funnel impacting our demand plan?
-What is the inventory risk if we are below plan?
-What is the revenue risk if we are above plan?
-Are our channels ready to back up our product launch goals?
This session will look at the insights that agile companies are demanding to run their business in a dynamic global environment, and the steps you can take to ensure you are better able to deliver them in your company.
Steelwedge also serves as a bronze sponsor of the S&OP for High-Tech Summit. Be sure to visit us at Booth #4, and follow the conference action on Twitter by using the hashtag #SOPHTSF.
Integrated Business Planning Summit
April 25-26, 2013, London
Click here for more information.
Steelwedge will be exhibiting at the Integrated Business Planning Summit in Booth #6. With more than 25 speakers and over 150 delegates, the event is the largest gathering of business executives leading integrated business planning initiatives. You can find out about the latest conference happenings on Twitter with the hashtag #IBPLDN.
Is there anything more critical to the global economy than its food supply?
Agribusiness companies bear the significant responsibility of feeding the world in the midst of incredible volatility. While facing the universal challenges of a sluggish global economy and increasing competition, agribusiness companies encounter incredible risk from climate instability, natural disasters, and growing global markets.
Learn more about the challenges that agribusiness face–and the ways in which Steelwedge helps to overcome them–in our new best-practice paper “Integrated Business Planning for Agribusiness.”
The multiple uncertainties that agribusiness companies encounter requires them to more frequently review and adjust supply plans, demand forecasts, and inventory positions. At the same time, they must implement approaches that reduce costs without sacrifi cing quality and customer satisfaction. To remain successful, agribusiness companies need to eliminate siloed processes that restrict their ability to closely collaborate with suppliers and quickly respond to demand fl uctuations.
We’d love to hear from agribusiness professionals about their approach to integrated business planning. Please share your thoughts in the comments below. And don’t forget to check out “Integrated Business Planning for Agribusiness“!
As organizations grapple with today’s multinational environment, and look to increasingly take more business processes global, numerous opportunities and pitfalls present themselves. Steelwedge recently explored these dynamics in a webinar entitled “The Pursuit of Growth: Is Your S&OP Glocal Enough?” The webinar was presented by Chris Turner, the co-founder of StrataBridge Consulting, and Nari Viswanathan, the VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at Steelwedge.
Early on in the webinar, Chris stated, “There is no one best practice approach for global S&OP. If anyone tries to sell you the ‘17 Steps to Perfect Global S&OP,’ you should definitely throw them out of your office.” This statement set a tone for the presentation, 
which offered principles to guide attendees’ thinking and help them avoid unintended cognitive traps around taking their sales and operations planning process global. Chris laid out a framework that strategy, innovation, and operations serve as fundamental laws that need to be recognized in any business decision-making.
What, exactly, does it mean to be “glocal”? The term was coined by Japanese economists in the 1980s, and refers to the simultaneity –the co-presence–of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies. As we all increasingly become global citizens, at the same time, our need to be different is heightened. Global and local are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they enable each other. It’s this unique balance that helps businesses find their way in diverse markets while trying to drive the economies of scale and the economies of scope and speed that come with size.
So what are the biggest cognitive traps and biases of going global? Chris outlined these:
A reluctance to admit complexity: A manager’s job is to cut through the complexity, get to the point, and rally people around it. But in a desire to do that, we often not only don’t want to admit to complexity, we end up being blind to it.
The desire to “jump to ‘algorithm’”: As humans, we like things to be neat, predictable, reliable, and repeatable. As you start to move into new territories, new channels, new geographies, new markets, however, some of your algorithmic roles that you’re carrying with you may not fit. You need to back off a little bit and being prepared to have a bit of trial and error and learn by doing.
Mechanistic approach: If you approach global business purely through process and technology, and you leave out the organic, or the “people part” of the equation, you will never be successful. In most cases, when moving into new territories, the cultural angle is much bigger than you expect.
The “duplication” trap: If you have an S&OP process in place at the country level, and you just repeat that process as you move into multiple countries, you will ultimately end up duplicating data and effort. Some of these decisions should be made at a different level.
How does a company ensure that it doesn’t fall prey to any of these traps when they embark on global expansion? According to Chris, these are the five key principles for strategic execution of global S&OP:
- Everyone has a good idea of the decisions for which he or she is responsible.
- Important information about the competitive environment gets to headquarters quickly.
- Once made, decisions are rarely second-guessed.
- Information flows freely across organizational boundaries.
- Employees have the information they need to understand the bottom-line impact of their day-to-day choices.
Blueprint for delivering on the five key principles for global S&OP
To ensure that a company can execute on these principles for successful global expansion, Nari advocated for developing a “blueprint” that is flexible and can adapt to local challenges. This blueprint is a fundamental technology enabler, which allows for a standard process, but also can have configurations created that are flexible to the local environment. Nari stated that in many of such engagements, Steelwedge leads the initial processes of scoping, design and implementation, and customers become involved at the validation and deployment stage.
“Adoption of blueprints is not purely a process issue but also a technology issue,” Nari said. “True blueprints are atomic and leveragable across not only companies in the same industry but also across industries.”
In future deployments or enhancements with these customers, the customer takes the lead and Steelwedge takes a backseat. “Getting truly globalized requires the company, through its own leadership activity, to look forward to future deployments for the solution,” Nari said.
You can learn more about becoming “glocal” by viewing the archived webinar here.
What is your experience with the challenges and opportunities inherent in taking your business global while keeping local concerns in mind? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Got 30 minutes? Spend it with us on March 20, at 12:00 noon EDT, for the Steelwedge Demo at Your Desk. We invite you to take a peek inside the cloud to see how sales and operations technology can drive meaningful scale, speed and performance for your global planning initiatives.
Steelwedge executives EJ Tavella and Roger Singh will host the live, interactive demonstration and open discussion, during which you’ll see the solution that companies such as Jaguar Land Rover, Lenovo, PZ Cussons and MetroPCS are using to power their planning and decision-making process.
During the Demo at Your Desk, you’ll learn how the Steelwedge cloud-based planning technology can help you:
- Improve your demand forecasting
- Increase visibility
- Reduce your inventory
- Improve your margin
- Model “what-if” alternatives
As business volatility has risen, increasing numbers of enterprise leaders have been driven to look at planning software to increase their agility—being able to quickly make the right decisions to navigate changes in demand and supply. Last year, a study of manufacturing business leaders showed that nearly 90 percent saw business agility as a key company imperative. Yet less than one third of them felt their organization was set up for agility. This agility gap is driving a huge interest in S&OP.
An interesting point: almost all of the leaders surveyed in the aforementioned study were using S&OP process—but only about 20 percent were powering that process with technology.
But S&OP technology adoption is on the rise. Industry leaders across discrete and process manufacturing sectors including high tech, consumer tech, industrials, chemical, agribusiness and CPG are increasingly seeking out technology solutions to supercharge their S&OP processes. Gartner’s recent market report on S&OP technology shows that this market is growing faster than any other segment of the supply chain industry.
Further, cloud-based solutions are driving the fastest adoption…and Steelwedge is seen by Gartner as the leading global provider of cloud-based integrated business planning solutions. The reason why is clear: Steelwedge technology unites your critical supply, demand and finance teams with all the data in whatever system each group has—all in one platform for faster collaboration and decision-making.
Don’t miss the opportunity to learn more during the Steelwedge Demo at Your Desk on March 20, at 12:00 noon EDT. Register here!
There are certain stock images associated with Valentine’s Day: flowers, hand holding, heart-shaped everything, especially candies. Every sweet manufacturer seems to have its own Valentine twist on its product.
Candy: it’s such an unassuming piece of sugary happiness, and one thing we’ve added to our headquarters office front desk is a whole dish full of it. There’s a pretty big selection of candies in the dish, from mini chocolate bars to hard fruit-flavored candies, soft chews, mints, et al. The office has consumers in the form of employees and visitors to the office who enjoy all the different types of candy available, with the chocolate being, perhaps not surprisingly, the favorite among them.
It occurs to me that there’s a mini S&OP process arising that keeps the candy dish bringing joy to the office. First there’s the tracking of which candies and candy types disappear the fastest, how much of which type to order so as not to take up too much valuable stocking space or to hold onto any type of candy too long. There’s the process of changing out the candy types every few days to keep the dish interesting to our consumers while ensuring the new and untried types are going to actually be eaten and not lie ignored in the bowl. What suppliers are going to deliver the types of candy we want with the best balance of availability, speed of delivery, and cost to us? Where do we get a candy we want in event that one of our suppliers runs out?
For our suppliers, where did they get their candy? How many wholesalers did they work with to bring us variety, and how many manufacturers did the wholesalers work with? How many other manufacturers did each of those manufacturers deal with to get each ingredient for their candies, and how many raw material suppliers did they work with to get things like corn for making corn syrup, cacao and milk for making chocolate, seeds for making dyes, or sugar cane for refining sugar?
How much S&OP did each of these companies use for their own products? What happens if just one link in the chain is broken at any given time—how would the chain persist on its course with the least disruption, and how much would they have to inflate final costs to keep production going?
Talk about big data.
How many hands did all this go through, how much planning was involved, and how many hours of work were put in just so we have our bowl of sugary happiness at work?
S&OP and supply chain management touch our everyday lives, every day, often with not too much thought on the consumers’ end except that they’re enjoying their favorite types of candy. It’s a gentle reminder that good S&OP is like good manners: when done right, its presence goes largely unrecognized, but its absence is certainly noticed.
