It has been only a month or so since I joined Steelwedge from Aberdeen Group and I have already had many great opportunities to interact with customers and prospects around Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Integrated Business Planning (IBP). I am planning to share my thoughts and ideas with you in a webcast on Thursday, October 13 on the topic, “Seven Keys to Integrated Business Planning Success.”

A very interesting statistic – the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) for August 2011 – caught my eye this morning. This metric tracks the financial activity of purchasing managers connected to their acquisition of goods and services. It is calculated on a monthly basis through a survey conducted by the Institute of Supply Management (ISM).

Surprisingly, the statistic concluded:

“Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in August for the 25th consecutive month, and the overall economy grew for the 27th consecutive month,” say the nation’s supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business^®.”

A visual representation of the metric is below. Please note that the way the metric is captured, any value above 50 percent is an improvement and a 100 percent value indicates that everyone in the survey indicates an improvement. The degree of change month-over-month is reflected in the actual value. For instance, 65 percent PMI for a month is a bigger change than 55 percent PMI.

Figure: PMI for 2010-2011

Source: Institute of Supply Management

So what does this mean for the supply chain executive who is looking at S&OP and IBP initiatives?

1. Need for Operational Efficiency: According to the ISM survey, the overall sentiment is one of concern and caution. In this sort of a situation, increasing operational efficiency and reducing waste in the end-to-end value chain is the best approach that

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Looking back over the year that was 2010, I jotted down several terms which struck me as interesting twists on some familiar terms.  Some of these twists were intentional mutations while others were totally unintentional.  My favorites tend to be of the unintended variety.  Here’s my Top 10 S&OP list of terms from 2010:

10.  Key Performance Medics:  Specially trained analysts who come to the rescue to turn around poor performance indicators

9.   Strategery:  a plan, approach, line of attack (very similar to strategy)

8.   Regression Forecasting:  Reverting to an earlier, more accurate forecast to give the impression of better forecasting

7.   Imperial Forecasting:  The ultimate Top Down forecast, dictated by the ruler of the kingdom

6.   Reactive demand shaping:  coming up with a marketing promotion during the month in which additional sales are needed rather than planning ahead as part of an overall strategy (or Strategery)

5.   Tough Luck Capacity Planning:  Similar to Rough Cut Capacity Planning; however, with Tough Luck, capacity is fixed so the supply plan drives the demand plan

4.   New Product Insanity:  The attempt to forecast new product launch dates

3.   Higher Keys:  Rooted in the data structure concept of hierarchies, this mutation is the idea that key groups are formed through aggregation

2.   Moving Adage Forecast:  A twist on moving average, continually changing forecast caused by management mood swings

And the number 1 term…

1.    Disaggravation:  The Steelwedge disaggregation functionality which enables users to enter forecasts at higher levels of aggregation, reducing the number entries and thus, reducing user aggravation.

What’s your forecast accuracy telling you? Stop and ask a few questions
Forecast accuracy is an important performance metric in any effective S&OP process, but it can be measured in various ways. Comparing your company’s accuracy to an industry standard will be difficult to impossible if you don’t know the details behind the measurement. More importantly, the metric needs to resonate within your organization as a meaningful indicator of forecast relevance. So then…
What details should one consider for forecast accuracy measurement?

Here’s the Steelwedge Top Six:
1. Aggregation level: Are you measuring accuracy at a product SKU or family level? What about other hierarchy levels? Odds are your accuracy will appear to be better at an aggregated level such as family. This happens because variability of forecasts and actuals tend to cancel out one another as data is combined. The result is a smoothing of results and lowering of error calculations. Recommendation: Measure accuracy at the same level as the majority of forecasts are captured.
2. Error Calculation: In its most basic form, accuracy is a measure of the difference between a prediction and what actually happened. How far off were we? Error is equal to the difference between forecast and actual. Often, this is captured as a percentage value called percent error. Mean absolute percent error (MAPE) calculates the average of errors. Since we don’t want positives and negatives to cancel out each other, we use the absolute values of each error. There are other methods, but MAPE is fairly common. Weighted MAPE is a method used to give greater importance (weight) to items with greater activity. Amount of activity may be defined as the proportion a particular item is of the total. Recommendation: Keep it simple. Make sure people understand the measurement and how…

Steelwedge Software Inc., the leading provider of software-as-a-service Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, today announced that it was named one of the top 500  software companies.  This year’s inclusion in the Software 500 marks the third straight year Steelwedge Software, Inc. has been ranked.

“The 2009 Software 500 results show that revenue growth in the software and services industry was healthy, with total Software 500 revenue of $491.3 billion worldwide for 2008 representing 8.8 percent growth from the previous year,” said John P. Desmond, editor of Software Magazine and Softwaremag.com.

“The Software 500 helps CIOs, senior IT managers and IT staff research and create the short list of business partners,” Desmond says. “It is a quick reference of vendor viability. And the online version to be posted soon at www.Softwaremag.com is searchable by category, making it what we call the online catalog to enterprise software.”

“Our continued growth is further validation that our customers experience substantial business benefits from the Steelwedge S&OP solution,” said Glen Margolis, CEO and founder of Steelwedge Software, Inc. “We will continue to innovate and provide our customers with the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions they need to increase their revenue and competitive advantage.”

The Software 500 is a revenue-based ranking of the world’s largest software and services suppliers targeting medium to large enterprises, their IT professionals, software developers and business managers involved in software and services purchasing.

The ranking is based on total worldwide software and services revenue.  This includes revenue from software licenses, maintenance and support, training and software-related services and consulting.  The financial information was gathered by a survey prepared by King Content Co. and posted at www.Softwaremag.com, as well as from public documents.