Tag Archives: agility

Secrets to Top Line Revenue Success in High Tech

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The high-tech industry is characterized by fickle consumers and demand, market volatility and a move towards highly-customized solutions. These market forces create immense pressure on managing a global supply chain. In last week’s Steelwedge Agility Series Webinar, experienced Chief Supply Chain Officer, Dennis Omanoff, addressed the hit-and-miss realities of using sales and operations planning (S&OP) to make a difference in high-tech business. As he stated:

“We are in a world today of tremendous opportunity and the challenge now is how to unlock this box.”

Dennis explained that if you focus less on the sales order and more on the value of getting it right - you can:

•        Maximize revenue

•        Build customer loyalty

•        Create stockholder and shareholder value

According to Dennis, “The best way to drive that value is by powering better data visibility.” He added, “Breaking down paradigms of how companies share information and what companies share, we all win together.”

This includes a shift in:

•        Leadership/internal engagement

•        Customer engagement

•        Connecting to the “other side” of the order: Supplier engagement

•        Information visibility

Yet, according to statistics from a fall report by SCM World, only a few organizations have embraced this shift and maximized that value from their S&OP.

Here is a look at where leading global manufacturers are CAPTURING VALUE FROM S&OP today.  Does this look like your situation?

If you look at the above chart, only 10 percent of global organizations have externally aligned with suppliers and customers, etc. What seems to be missing is any mechanism for placing a meaningful value on the flexibility that customers demand from their suppliers. Think of the opportunity to drive value here!

By rethinking existing, siloed processes and developing new ones that anticipate demand, we can react more quickly to the unexpected. Are you ready?

If missed this webinar,  you can check out the replay here.

Have you unlocked the potential of your S&OP? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

What is leadership, anyway?

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The verdict is finally in. After two years in the making, Gartner recently published its Marketscope report for S&OP.  And, Steelwedge was once again positioned as a leader in this market landscape summary report.

While the industry recognition is gratifying, we think leadership is about continuing to think ahead of the market:  to set the bar, and to deliver on solutions that help pave the way.  At Steelwedge, we believe in the importance and potential of technology-enabled process design to power Integrated Business Planning.  And we believe in simplicity and speed in delivering those solutions– most readily realized through the cloud.

Business Context

Dramatic changes in the economy and global operations have changed how planning operates in organizations. A well-organized Supply Chain process can enhance sales, operations, finance and other functional areas of an organization. Incorporating collaborative inputs from customers and suppliers into the planning process is instrumental in today’s highly outsourced supply chains. This is the reason why many organizations are increasingly focused on advancing the leverage they get from their planning processes to enable cross-functional and multi-enterprise visibility.

Leading the Way to IBP

At Steelwedge, we’re helping to lead the journey to the most agile, collaborative form of planning. Gartner calls this Level 4 S&OP, or Integrated Business Planning.

From our deep experience with large global manufacturers, we see seven key success strategies for successful  IBP:

  1. Engage sales and marketing
  2. Link financial plan to the operational plan
  3. Ensure cross functional and multi-enterprise collaborative process
  4. Continuously align strategy with operations
  5. Ensure process agility and flexibility through technology
  6. Capture metrics for performance management as part of the process
  7. Optimized demand-supply-finance balancing

 

Single Platform, Purpose-Built for Planning

Highlighted in the Gartner report, the Steelwedge Integrated Business Planning solution is a single, cloud-based platform with modules that enable companies to engage at any stage of their planning maturity, including: S&OP Sales, S&OP Operations, S&OP Collaboration and Executive S&OP. Further, we’ve added a Service Delivery Platform to dramatically lower implementation cycles.  Indeed, Gartner highlighted Steelwedge for its broad range of S&OP support from early demand and supply balancing through collaboration and orchestration, and also called out our roadmap for continued delivery.

We take seriously our responsibility, as a leader in business planning solutions, to continue to drive value and drive the agenda in this exciting space.  We’d love to hear from you on what planning leadership means at your organization.

8 S&OP How To’s with Lora Cecere

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Lora CecereEd. note: At Steelwedge’s May webinar, Lora Cecere, unveiled the results of a new study on supply chain agility and the role of S&OP in improving an organization’s response capabilities. Following the webinar, Lora took a few questions from the audience but we couldn’t get to all of them, so we threw out a short answer challenge. Answer 16 questions from the webinar as succinctly as possible. Here are the first eight in the series. -R

  1. What is the most surprising thing you discovered researching the importance of agility?
    That only 13% of companies effectively tie S&OP planning to agility.
  2. How do you achieve agility when faced with long lead times (1 yr+)?
     I believe that the longer the lead times the greater the impact that agility techniques can have on the supply chain.  This is accomplished by modeling demand and supply volatility and building playbooks to anticipate these impacts on supply chain reliability.  A mature S&OP process helps companies to align against variability. 
  3. How can you visualize the process of sales and operations for long-term future, if this is so volatile?
    Through role-based dashboards.
  4. What is your perspective of impact of “external changes” on stable industries such as mining, oil, gas etc?  Customers simply need coal, oil or gas they do not care how these products are e.g. innovated,packaged, delivered etc.
    I believe that this needs to be handled through market-to-market modeling in S&OP.  Buy modeling demand shifts (e.g. the changing price structures of fuel alternatives) and market supply variability (the levels of stockpiles), companies can do what if analysis to mitigate market risks.
  5. In your opinion has S&OP technology with process and change management finally become the recommended approach, and if so why?
    It depends.  There needs to be a system of record for companies that have multiple S&OP processes. 
  6. We have mixture of S&OP by Microsoft Excel and ERP. How do you rate the “flexibility” of specific supply chain software to cover specific needs?
    ERP is inflexible, and excel is not deep enough.  Neither are good alternatives.
  7. We use S&OP for supply / demand balancing of resources but find the complexity of the person’s skill set impacts our decisions. Any thoughts on how to balance the understanding of the detail against the need to make effective decisions?
    This happens through the selection of technology that aligns with the skill sets with the what-if modeling.  If there is still a gap, consider business process outsourcing.
  8. What are the critical success factors in implementing a S&OP/IBP in a large organization?
    The most critical element is the building of a supply chain strategy and educating the executive team on why this matters.

3 SCM best practices and agility lessons I learned from HP

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Every 60 seconds, Hewlett-Packard delivers four servers, 120 PCs and 100 printers to their customers. That’s according to Tony Prophet, the senior vice president of operations in HP’s Personal Systems Group, who spoke at the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit last week. During his keynote address, Prophet addressed how HP has successfully delivered these products using the supply chain management best practices the company began to implement in 2006. Prophet encourages all companies to: Continue reading →

Researching Corporate Agility Trends in S&OP

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Earlier this week, Supply Chain Shaman Lora Cecere joined the Steelwedge webinar series to present research on S&OP and corporate agility trends. It’s clear from the results of Lora’s survey of 100+ supply chain professionals that, while agility is increasingly important to your business, it’s difficult to master in practice. Over 80% of respondents noted that agility was very important but less than 30% feel they are able to implement an agile response. During the webinar, Lora and Nari did some further study by asking webinar attendees their thoughts on a few agility topics, so I thought we’d share that research here. Continue reading →