Where in the World Is Steelwedge?: April 2013 Conference Schedule

Posted on April 11, 2013 by Lauren Bossers

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 talking bar chart 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.

How S&OP-Ready Are You?

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Didi D'Errico

This week, one of Steelwedge’s flagship customers, Jack Lyon, the VP of Operations at Enterasys, led a thought-provoking webinar discussion on the benefits of S&OP for delivering long term growth. Enterasys has enjoyed an enviable streak of q/q growth for the past 3 years, and credits their S&OP foundation for powering better business agility to support that growth.

Equally interesting was the participant engagement via live polling during the session. Test yourself on these S&OP readiness questions, then see how you fared vs. the replies from more than 300 registrants spanning from CIOs to VPs of Supply Chain, Sales and Marketing, and Demand Planners.

What is your biggest planning challenge?

Global volatility: 14%
Demand visibility: 18%
Supply excess: 3%
Collaborative planning and engagement: 29%
All of the above 35%

At Steelwedge, we’ve seen a big evolution in this answer over the past 10 years alone. What started as a heavy focus on managing supply constraints, has morphed with the increasing dependency on trading partners and suppliers around the globe. Today, there is a necessary focus on collaboration—not only within the “four walls” of the company, but also including partners and customers. As business becomes more global, companies lose control and visibility of their supply chains due to outsourcing. And they are increasingly realizing the need to trade out control for better alignment with their partners in exchange for better visibility. Connecting the dots gives them what Enterasys has–agility to grow.

How long have you been doing S&OP?

1.     Not doing it: 5%
2.     Considering it: 14%
3.     Less than a year: 24%
4.     Less than 10 years: 40%
5.     More than 10 years: 17%

This identified the Gordian knot of S&OP. A practice that has been around for 30 years, S&OP is still fraught with challenges. 81% of the webinar participants have been practicing S&OP –and nearly 1/5 for have been at it for more than a decade. But they are still looking for how to optimize the practice. Part of the challenge is the rapidly—and constantly—changing global marketplace. Part is crossing the chasm in S&OP maturity—like Enterasys did—from operational reacting and demand/supply matching (where Gartner expects the majority of companies are stuck today) to more strategic, proactive and agile collaboration and pre-emptive orchestration of their business.

As Jack said:

“ You can’t do S&OP without a solid strategy and executive level sponsorship/engagement. But, equally, you can’t do S&OP well without technology to transform the process and provide real-time data to get you to the end game quicker.”

Without a cohesive technology framework to support an evolving S&OP process maturity, companies spin their wheels year after year.

What technology are you using for S&OP?

Nothing: 3%
Spreadsheets: 60%
Existing ERP, SCM and/or CRM: 18%
S&OP specific technology: 11%
All of the above: 8%

This portrays the biggest technology dilemma companies face: what to do with the ubiquitous spreadsheet? The reality today: both laggards and leading companies use spreadsheets. And many use them to mainly bridge process gaps left from one-size-fits all technology. But spreadsheets alone don’t do the trick. They are not scalable, forcing S&OP teams to try and aggregate, manually, a view that can take a week or longer—every month—to produce. At the same time, spreadsheets can contain a process unique to a business, that can’t otherwise be leveraged in a centralized S&OP automated tool.

At Steelwedge, one of our design principles is to power agility, and allow for configuration within our integrated, single platform system that can automatically populate, aggregate and harmonize data collected from across the company in dozens of spreadsheets, as well as to extend our platform to create apps right on top so that businesses can fold in the processes unique to them.

As we learned from Enterasys , there is no one size fits all approach to S&OP, nor is there a way to build it and be done. It is a journey. Done well, the journey drives continuous, incremental value that can get and keep your business growing, regardless of the market situation.

Where are you in your planning journey? We’d like to hear from you. dderrico@steelwedge.com

Time is the New Currency

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Nari Viswanathan

This week, the Wall Street Journal pegged it: Global companies took years building supply chains. In 2011, natural disasters took just days to break them all apart. Like it or not, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) is the new normal, and more than ever before, time is the new currency.

Here’s what I mean by that: with the rapid outgrowth of linear supply chains into multi-enterprise networks, loss of control and visibility have become the top challenges for many supply chains. Proliferating risks in the demand-supply network and increasing lead-times due to expanding networks makes flexibility the key to overcoming challenges.

This was indeed a hot topic at the latest trade show I attended, Supply Chain Logistics 2011, where the theme was agility and flexibility. Leaders of supply chain strategies and leading global companies were on hand to discuss, debate and deliver ideas about how they—and the industry at large—can tap different approaches, such as Integrated Business Planning, to ensure they are more agile. It is imperative that they are able to beat the clock and deliver better returns to their companies in a world where VUCA reigns and no one has the luxury to sit out the storm and wait for smoother seas.

Well known risk management expert, Yossi Sheffi of MIT drove a fascinating discussion on resiliency. He used case studies to highlight examples of enterprise resiliency in the face of unexpected “Black Swan” disruptions. Gerry Smith, Global VP of Supply Chain at Lenovo, brought home the message with real-life examples of the challenges Lenovo faced during the Japanese Tsunami and the Thai Floods of 2011.

Think of it this way: you advance your planning process with flexibility; you protect your business with agility. While both flexibility and agility have short-term and long-term results, it is no longer enough to focus primarily on the short-term benefits. There is a limit to the strategies and tactics that companies can adopt in the short term within the lead-time. To optimize the new time currency, you must be able to look at strategic scenarios and analyze longer term tradeoffs based on the market conditions within the lead-time. This mix of strategic and operational scenario management has become mandatory due to the rising complexity of supply chains. Sales & Operations Planning provides the ideal balance: an antidote to volatility.

What do you think? Are you capitalizing on time?

Visit the Steelwedge community on LinkedIn to share your views or to discuss the topics in this blog post.

Raise a Cup of Kindness

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Glen Margolis

As we exit another wild, unpredictable year filled with economic, political and environmental upheaval—resulting in changes wrought of inspiration, desperation and perspiration, a virtual salute.

Indeed, as a global community there is much to be lauded, much to be learned and much to be leery from 2011. Cultural revolutions from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street; regional economic fissures, that have produced a global network of fiscal fault lines; and a heaping helping of Mother Nature’s wrath have both threatened and united us. It is the same in our industry, where finance, sales and operations teams are increasingly aligning to better recognize, respond and recalibrate to these same global dynamics. We are all learning the lessons of better alignment and agility in our ability to thrive.

Like it or not, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), is our “new normal.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of one of my favorite books, The Black Swan, explores the idea that an event—positive or negative—that is deemed improbable, like the appearance of a Black Swan, can cause massive consequences.

I am inspired by what I’ve seen in 2011 from our customers, from our peers and from our Steelwedge team in approaching and resolving their own Black Swans. I’ve seen 100-year-old businesses face recession-driven loss in demand, and realign to come out tighter, stronger and better; I’ve seen consumer electronics powerhouses stare down the reality of ever-shortening product lifecycles with laser-focus on smart new product development; I’ve seen a Phoenix rise from the ashes of the automotive industry through powerful focus and improved management; I’ve seen manufacturers rebound after losing a supplier of 90% of a core part in the devastating tsunami; and I’ve seen hard choices made clearer, and sooner with better empirical data.

So, though we may not know the next Black Swan coming just around the corner in 2012, I raise a cup of kindness to what we’ve seen, what we’ve done and who we’ve met that have changed us for the better in 2011.

We too have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give us a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.

S&OP Beyond the Basics: Q&A Part 2

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Nari Viswanathan

As part of our commitment to drive engaging dialogue in the industry around the best and ‘next’ practices, Steelwedge recently teamed up with Sales & Operations Planning expert Tom Wallace to host a webinar. ‘Taking S&OP to the Next Level’ is based on the new book, Sales and Operations Planning: Beyond the Basics. You can watch a recording of the webinar here if you missed the live event. Given that S&OP is a top priority for companies to tackle volatility, the Steelwedge webinar drew a huge attendance and just as many questions! Due to time constraints, our experts couldn’t answer all of them.

In this blog post, Tom Wallace answers some key questions from his perspective.

Q. Is S&OP ideal for large organizations which have their own manufacturing, inventory & products? Is S&OP applicable to a service company?

Yes to both. Some of the most successful users of S&OP are large organizations with manufacturing, inventory and product: BASF, the largest chemical company in the world; Procter & Gamble, the largest consumer packaged goods company; and Staples, a very large on-line retailer. S&OP has been shown to work well in organizations that don’t make physical products as well: banks, central engineering staffs, IT departments and the like.

Q. Should the same forecast drive both manufacturing and profit and loss?

Absolutely. The forecast, once authorized, becomes the one and only one statement of future demand. Only with this can you achieve a “one-number process,” which means running the business internally with one set of numbers.

Q. How do you balance continuous improvement to the S&OP process against over-engineering the process?

Listen to the people actually using the process, including senior management. The best way I know to drive continuous improvement is, at the end of each executive meeting, ask each person present to rate the meeting on a scale of 10 and give 50 –or fewer– words why, finishing with the leader of the business. Those people will tell you where to improve and where not to.

Q. What is the best approach to organize promotional activities in the forecast process?

Within the 5-Step Process of S&OP, Step 2 is Demand Planning; this includes the addition of promotions and related activities by people from organizations like Marketing, Sales Promotion, and Merchandising. The promotions are added to the forecast early, well in advance of the consensus forecast going to Step 3, Supply Planning.

Q. What are the main pitfalls if you are in an S&OP process implementation?

The primary pitfall, much greater than all others, is to fail to educate the people in S&OP. Note the use of the word “educate” rather than “train.” That’s deliberate: training tells people how to run the software; education addresses how to run the business using this new tool.

Please write to us at info@steelwedge.com should you have any questions or need elucidation on any of the concepts mentioned in this blog.

Have a Happy New Year!

Tag Archives: Demand Forecasting