Collaborative Planning
Release 5.1 with Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) Dashboards
Steelwedge introduces Release 5.1 with Executive Sales and Operations Planning Dashboards Steelwedgecontinues its rapid growth as five new customers select SPPM Release 5.1 — the industry’s leading cloud-based Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solution.
Youtube Video Link: Steelwedge Sales and Operations Planning release 5.1
Steelwedge Software, the leading innovator in Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, today announced a new product release for its Cloud-based Sales Planning & Performance Management (SPPM) solution featuring configurable Executive S&OP Dashboards, enhanced best-practice based Executive S&OP workflow capabilities, and expanded scalability.
Steelwedge SPPM Release 5.1 represents a significant milestone in the product’s maturity and development life cycle. The primary focus of Release 5.1 was to further enhance usability, scalability, elevate a business user orientation and extend the supportability of the platform. In particular, enhancements and new capabilities have been developed for Release 5.1 in the following areas: User Interface, Dashboards, Workflow Scheduling, Configuration and Platform.
One of the most visible changes in SPPM Release 5.1 is the new web based Executive S&OP homepage which has evolved into a more powerful business user work center designed to help a user plan, monitor performance and manage by exception. The new homepage includes an intuitive tabbed structure.
Release 5.1 also incorporates a new, best-in-class statistical forecasting engine – the Steelwedge Optimized Forecasting Engine (SOFE), enhanced Excel-based S&OP Templates and powerful customer-level S&OP Master Data management capabilities.
“Steelwedge Release 5.1 enables Steelwedge to further strengthen our leadership position in the S&OP marketplace”, said Steelwedge CEO Glen Margolis, “Existing Steelwedge customers and prospects are extremely excited about the new release because it will have a significant impact on their financial and operational performance.”
“With Release 5.1, Steelwedge has continued to assert its leadership position as the best-in-class S&OP solution – Steelwedge has enabled us to reduce our inventory by over 18%. We are confident that the new release will enable us to even further improve our business operations” said the COO of a leading high technology manufacturer and Steelwedge customer.
As a Certified SAP Partner, the Steelwedge S&OP solution release 5.1 seamlessly integrates into SAP ERP and APO to drive Executive Sales and Operations Planning processes. Recent Steelwedge customers adopting Release 5.1 include General Electric, Intuit, Contech and Hospira.
The economy is getting better, oil prices are up…what next?
Anyone following the news is aware of the now steady drumbeat (finally!) of good news on the economic front. Exports are up, Europe is doing better, home sales are up, and, of course, the stock market is up. But wait, what follows next? Oil prices are up. Soon, commodities prices will start rising. Then transportation costs will rise.
So what does this mean for manufacturers and how does it relate to Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)?? Clearly, after many quarters of focus on efficient operations and lean inventory management, the focus will once again shift to managing supply chain costs. Transportation costs, materials costs, and eventually labor costs will eventually rise to prominence.
Are you prepared?
Effective planning is essential. How will your operations change if there is another oil spike? What will you do if a port is closed down by a strike? How do transportation economics impact lead times? These are just a few of the questions that must be understood by planners.
Ensuring that your S&OP Plan incorporates scenarios that mitigate these concerns is fast becoming essential. Ensuring that your team is aware and focused is even more essential. Today’s S&OP solutions such as Compass Express by Steelwedge offer the perfect antidote for these kind of challenges.
Improving Business Performance with Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
Effective Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) measurably improves margins. However, historically, S&OP relied on backward-facing shipment data, subjective opinion, and incomplete operational data. It was overly complex, costly, time-consuming, unreliable and inaccurate.
Now, technology-enabled S&OP processes drive a practical S&OP process, systematically integrating people, processes and data, and restoring confidence in the forecasting and planning processes. Effective technology-enabled S&OP guides participants through a workflow-driven, collaborative process, resulting in a highly accurate aligned forecast and plan that all functions and trading partners can trust. With solutions such as Steelwedge Compass Express S&OP planners can quickly adapt resources to changing conditions, significantly increase margins and dramatically improve revenue predictability. The key is the adoption of a flexible, easy to use, collaborative, and comprehensive solution.
Improve Revenue Visibility
Two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have no formal way of aligning supply and demand based on corporate-wide inputs. Unscientific approaches result in poor focus of organizational resources like capacity, manufacturing, staffing, sales efforts, finance and budgets. The overall Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process suffers in turn. Creating true revenue visibility not only requires strong analytic support, but also the automation of systematic and automated processes for soliciting feedback and creating agreement among multiple parties
Create a Profitable S&OP Plan
Steelwedge empowers executives to evaluate alternate pricing scenarios, product mixes, and configurations. Once the optimum margin forecast scenario has been identified, promotions, product packaging and configuration, and customer targeting decisions can be even further tuned to drive the most profitable demand plan possible. Through participative processes, sales, operations, marketing, and finance are able to work in unison toward a common goal of selling and delivering the most profitable mix of products. The result is enhanced corporate earnings and more efficient operations.
Increase Corporate Accountability
Most planners point solutions don’t allow you to identify, track and archive multiple plans of record, individual adjustments, detailed accountability statistics, and process measurements. For example, the sales staff is inevitably overshooting and undershooting their numbers. However, they typically do it consistently. What’s needed is a system for tracking those consistent fluctuations and archiving the information for analysis.
Support Emerging Manufacturing Initiatives
Steelwedge is the first S&OP solution that addresses vital emerging manufacturing initiatives, revenue visibility issues, and corporate accountability challenges faced by today’s corporations.
Outsourcing Managing outside suppliers or contractors requires a high degree of collaboration and communication, as well as negotiation skill when dealing with competitive bids for limited manufacturing capacity. Accurately understanding inventory liabilities, managing demand and coordinating forecasts is essential for effective outsourcing.
Postponement Planning In order to understand how many configured products will be sold and to “manage the mix,” manufacturing companies need to dynamically manage product attach rates and connect sales pipeline data to customer buying patterns that are based on historical estimates and analysis of item/component demand.
Lean Manufacturing There is a misconception that with just-in-time (JIT) inventory there is no inventory and hence no need for a forecast. In actuality, accurate forecasts are more important than ever. Suppliers need to know what orders to expect, and specialized components often have long lead times and are not always in inventory. Moreover, regardless of short-term operational requirements, product management, marketing and finance need to plan and invest based on a common set of future assumptions.
Mix Management In today’s volative environment, companies are struggling to understand and deliver the right mix of products, components, and packages. Retailer’s are increasingly bundling products to reduce costs and increase margins while technology players are becoming highly focused on delivering the exact mix of components required by their clients. In this envrionment, the need for an S&OP process that manages product mix and assortment is crucial.
Why has Sales and Operations Planning moved to the forefront?
Over the past six months, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has moved to the forefront of corporate agendas. Why has S&OP – a long established business process for integrating supply with demand to improve decision-making – risen in prominence? The answer is that multiple forces have converged to not only raise the need for improved integrated supply-demand planning to the top of the agenda, but also to make it truly possible:
1. For the first time in the history of S&OP – thanks to cloud computing and other technologies – it is possible for companies to implement and adopt this mission-critical process in a timely manner. The evolution of ERP, CRM and SCM solutions coupled with improved data stores, data integration tools and user sophistication has further driven this growth.
2. The cloud computing approach and the advent of highly specialised S&OP applications means that business users no longer need to rely on weighty IT support to drive their S&OP process. In the past, business users were dependent on internal IT organizations with long lists of competing priorities, disparate platform standards, long capiital budgeting cycles, and limited bandwidth to support such initiatives. Today, thanks to cloud computing and improved integration tools, it is possible to implement an S&OP system in the time it used to take just to order the hardware – as little as 10 to 12 weeks.
3. Oversupply and unpredictable demand in today’s economy coupled with staff shortages are making it more imperative than ever to improve, reduce the latency, and automate the process. If in past years the focus was on supply deliver, today the focus is on tightly matching supply against demand.
4. The high cost and limited availability of credit have put new pressures on working capital and therefore inventory management. The need for more effective inventory management coupled with volatilty in demand make S&OP an essential process for corporate success.
And so, the list of reasons why S&OP has become so hot grows daily. What other items would you add?
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.
Creating Value through Purpose Built S&OP Technology
Many corporations are turning to S&OP to create value by improving financial and operational performance through better alignment of supply and demand. However, the majority applications that claim to be “S&OP” solutions (e.g. excel, demand planning, supply planning, business intelligence…), where designed as “building blocks” to solve only a subset of the S&OP problem. S&OP “building blocks” are critical functions for an effective S&OP solution, however, they where not architected and designed to leverage the full value resulting from a fully technology enabled Executive S&OP process.
To achieve the full benefits of S&OP, a convergence of multiple capabilities within a technology platform is required to enable the process including:
- Centralized Database
- Info Bridge
- Multi-Level Planning
- Multi-User Collaboration Model
- Flexible Business Rules & Formulas
- Workflow
- Performance Management
The Steelwedge OnDemand Executive S&OP solution was designed with a 100% focus on S&OP. It was architected and designed to specifically meet the requirements of an Executive S&OP solution. The Steelwedge OnDemand Executive S&OP solution is built on an enterprise class three-tiered Java platform that embraces the seven key capabilities identified above.
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