If you’re like most people, you drive your car nearly every day. You’re very familiar with how to operate your vehicle and navigate your way. But do you know what’s happening under the hood? Can you anticipate problems coming before they actually manifest? For many of us, we entrust experts to maintain and repair our cars to keep us going.

In business, we’re driving hard every day. We depend on people, processes and technology to work seamlessly to deliver desired results. Do we always achieve those results? Sometimes, we fall short. Identifying the shortfall is not the hard part. Discerning ‘why’ and affecting change is the challenge.

Let Steelwedge be your expert mechanic. Leveraging deep domain experience and strong partnerships, Steelwedge brings best practices to life with focus on S&OP, demand planning, forecasting, supply planning and performance measurement. We assess your current state business processes, find potential improvement areas, develop action plans and help you get to where you need to be. We’ll even refill your wiper blade fluid!

Steelwedge strategic services begin with discovery. We focus on four key elements which illuminate current position and point to improvement opportunities.

Benchmarking: We approach each client with eyes wide open. Your business is unique and we want to understand what makes you special. At the same time, there are best practice methodologies that have helped numerous organizations achieve excellent results. We focus on documenting your current practices, results and metrics. These benchmark results and metrics are compared to industry best practices as well as your future results to measure improvement gains.

H2F2 Analysis: The H2F2 approach was developed by Steelwedge to dig deeply into the details of your data. This is not a theoretical review of generic data. This is your company data analyzed by the Strategic Services team. The result is a customized assessment which includes:

· Hierarchies – analysis of hierarchies and levels to be used for forecasting, planning and S&OP.

· History Data – Historical sales transaction data can tell a compelling story. We look for trends and make observations that help to focus attention in areas of greatest opportunity.

· Forecasting – Using your data, we generate multiple forecasts at various hierarchy levels. Our statistical engine uses a “best fit” model to choose the forecasting algorithm that minimizes forecast error and projects values into future periods.

· Forecast Accuracy – Higher forecast accuracy translates into lower inventory levels, improved customer service, increased sales revenue, increased margin and increased profit. It’s no surprise that forecast accuracy is getting more and more attention. Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) is our primary tool to measure the difference between actual and forecast values. Setting appropriate offsets and frozen periods are keys to getting meaningful, actionable results.

· Conclusions – The H2F2 analysis captures a view into the organization that produces key insights which may be leveraged in the future state design.

Hierarchy Selection: Choosing the appropriate structure for interacting with data is critical. A “bottom-up” forecasting approach requires that users are able to interact with data at a very detailed, low level such as product model or SKU. A “top-down” forecasting approach requires a view of aggregated data such as product families or geographic regions. Leveraging our extensive experience, we assist you to select the optimal hierarchies and hierarchy levels to meet your unique business challenges.

Hierarchies represent the framework within which users will navigate to get to the specific slice of the data world they desire. A well-designed hierarchy structure will support field users and product managers who will need to view, analyze and collaborate at a detailed level. At the same time, top management will need to see rolled-up values at a much higher level. Intermediate levels afford other contributors to see necessary levels such as product family. Generally, companies gravitate to three hierarchies: product, customer and geography.

Hierarchies may exist within an ERP system and be transferred to an S&OP system. Another alternative is to create the hierarchy within the S&OP system. In this later case, it should still be possible to map the hierarchy to other systems such as ERP and CRM.

Optimal Forecast Levels: Statistical forecasts may be generated at any level of aggregation across any and all hierarchies. Generating a statistical forecast at the lowest detailed levels may introduce intermittent or sparse demand that leads to unstable forecast projections. At the other extreme, forecasting at a corporate level may yield stable forecast results but will certainly omit important mix details for products, customers or locations. We analyze statistical outputs to find the right balance between statistical accuracy and meaningfulness of forecast levels.

Leveraging the four discovery elements above, we’re in excellent position to construct a current state process. Then, using best practice guidelines and careful consideration of company goals, together we construct the future state vision. This vision may be readily attainable or a sizable undertaking. We work closely with you to isolate the gaps and develop a strategic roadmap.

In summary, we offer a practical, results-driven, quick-win, assessment and improvement program which incorporates the following:

• Survey of the current environment
• Analysis including H2F2, benchmarking, hierarchy design and optimal forecasting level
• Identification of the gaps between current and best practices
• Improvement Recommendations