Steelwedge Closes the Agility Gap With New Mobile, Analytics and Big Data Capabilities

I’m excited to announce today that Steelwedge has launched the latest version of our sales and operations planning (S&OP) platform. This new release addresses the growing complexity and volatility that manufacturers are facing, and is designed to help them respond to these challenges with greater agility and intelligence.

Here are a few examples from our customer base that crystallize the kind of planning complexity that we are working to help address with our solution:

• The VP of Sales at a leading European automotive manufacturer needs to respond to a sudden devaluation of the Japanese Yen and regular fluctuations in the Euro.

What will the impact of these changes be on your margin? Should you adjust pricing or re-orient your sales force?  How do you sift through the explosion of information to make a decision? 

• The VP of Operations for a North American consumer electronics company is confronted by the rapid increase in the cost of components from China and disruptions in key parts sourced from Japan.

How do you respond? What is the impact on the bottom line?

Our new release works to solve these kinds of challenges in three ways:

Manage enormous data sets effectively. Making the right decisions for your business requires the processing of data at a scale not imaginable just a few years ago. Steelwedge has made major investments in new, disruptive technologies that enable us to leverage the unique scalability of the cloud to support Big Data requirements—and faster performance—like never before. 

Support rapidly changing business conditions. Our new S&OP Open Apps Architecture enables you to develop your own applications while leveraging Steelwedge planning data. Furthermore, it gives you access to great S&OP Apps created by others. Also, Steelwedge is the only company in the industry to now offer automatic upgrades. Once you have implemented Steelwedge, you will receive the benefits of every new technological development, feature and function without ever disrupting your ongoing operations.

Access insight on exceptions in your plans. The Steelwedge S&OP Insight planning analytics engine delivers fast analysis of your changing business—on an iPad, the web or through Excel. Changes in a plan don’t wait for days, or even hours. Neither should you. The Steelwedge planning analytics engine delivers insights and identifies exceptions in minutes.

Click here for a full set of resources on today’s news. I’m proud of the Steelwedge team that put tremendous thought leadership and thousands of man hours into this new product release. We’re committed to continue to deliver powerful cloud-based solutions for better agility in your business.

Got a Unique S&OP Process? There’s an App for That

Is part of your company’s competitive advantage captured in unique processes and KPIs that you can’t manage in your planning systems? Like your smartphone, your business’s planning system should enable business planners, partners, and others to build simple “apps” on top of it. These apps should enable you to embed and scale your unique capabilities and processes, and rapidly evolve them as your business and its needs change.

To learn about the possibilities that apps can bring to the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process, join Steelwedge on Tuesday, April 23, 2013 at 9:00 am PDT for the webinar “Got a Unique S&OP Process? There’s an App for That.” Dr. Blake Johnson, Stanford educator and supply chain innovator, will discuss the growing imperative to implement and scale differentiating planning capabilities. Dr. Johnson will share the benefits of an S&OP foundation that can be easily augmented – and automated – with emerging best-practice processes for your company’s otherwise unique “off-line” processes.

Register and attend the webinar to learn:

  • How to identify opportunities to leverage a planning system to accommodate inevitable changes in your business
  • How to connect and scale your company’s “secret sauce” processes with your planning system
  • Examples of emerging best-practice planning apps: range forecasting, segmentation, demand policy and stocking strategy
  • How to implement iPhone-like apps on your S&OP platform to not only support, but flex with your company’s processes

We hope to “see” you at the webinar! In the meantime, let us know in the comments what unique processes you want to capture in your S&OP process.

What Do S&OP and Football Have in Common?

The requirements for successfully conducting business today are not unlike the qualities that a football team needs to be triumphant on the gridiron. Both face diverse and aggressive competition. Both require the agility to make adjustments mid-stream, in response to changing requirements and environmental dynamics. And both must use historical information to make decisions while also anticipating what will happen in the future.

Applying what we know about winning on the football field to find success in the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process served as the topic of a recent Supply Chain Digest article authored by Steelwedge CEO Glen Margolis. In the article, Glen outlines five strategies that both S&OP and football teams must take to win:

  1. You have to know—and play—your role
  2. Establish a common goal—and communicate regularly about it
  3. Have a plan—and a contingency plan
  4. Ensure your equipment employs state-of-the-art technology
  5. Manage by the metrics

Ultimately, on the football field or in S&OP, winning requires leadership, visibility, teamwork, accountability, and agility. Click here to learn more about the best-practice parallels that Glen draws between S&OP and football. Do you have any other comparisons that you can add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

Integrated Business Planning for Agribusiness

Is there anything more critical to the global economy than its food supply?
Agribusiness companies bear the significant responsibility of feeding the world in the midst of incredible volatility. While facing the universal challenges of a sluggish global economy and increasing competition, agribusiness companies encounter incredible risk from climate instability, natural disasters, and growing global markets.

Learn more about the challenges that agribusiness face–and the ways in which Steelwedge helps to overcome them–in our new best-practice paper “Integrated Business Planning for Agribusiness.”

The multiple uncertainties that agribusiness companies encounter requires them to more frequently review and adjust supply plans, demand forecasts, and inventory positions. At the same time, they must implement approaches that reduce costs without sacrificing quality and customer satisfaction. To remain successful, agribusiness companies need to eliminate siloed processes that restrict their ability to closely collaborate with suppliers and quickly respond to demand fluctuations.

We’d love to hear from agribusiness professionals about their approach to integrated business planning. Please share your thoughts in the comments below. And don’t forget to check out Integrated Business Planning for Agribusiness“!

Is Your S&OP “Glocal” Enough?

As organizations grapple with today’s multinational environment, and look to increasingly take more business processes global, numerous opportunities and pitfalls present themselves. Steelwedge recently explored these dynamics in a webinar entitled “The Pursuit of Growth: Is Your S&OP Glocal Enough?” The webinar was presented by Chris Turner, the co-founder of StrataBridge Consulting, and Nari Viswanathan, the VP of Product Management and Product Marketing at Steelwedge.

Early on in the webinar, Chris stated, “There is no one best practice approach for global S&OP. If anyone tries to sell you the ‘17 Steps to Perfect Global S&OP,’ you should definitely throw them out of your office.” This statement set a tone for the presentation, which offered principles to guide attendees’ thinking and help them avoid unintended cognitive traps around taking their sales and operations planning process global. Chris laid out a framework that strategy, innovation, and operations serve as fundamental laws that need to be recognized in any business decision-making.

What, exactly, does it mean to be “glocal”? The term was coined by Japanese economists in the 1980s, and refers to the simultaneity –the co-presence–of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies. As we all increasingly become global citizens, at the same time, our need to be different is heightened. Global and local are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they enable each other. It’s this unique balance that helps businesses find their way in diverse markets while trying to drive the economies of scale and the economies of scope and speed that come with size.

So what are the biggest cognitive traps and biases of going global? Chris outlined these:

A reluctance to admit complexity: A manager’s job is to cut through the complexity, get to the point, and rally people around it. But in a desire to do that, we often not only don’t want to admit to complexity, we end up being blind to it.

The desire to “jump to ‘algorithm’”: As humans, we like things to be neat, predictable, reliable, and repeatable. As you start to move into new territories, new channels, new geographies, new markets, however, some of your algorithmic roles that you’re carrying with you may not fit. You need to back off a little bit and being prepared to have a bit of trial and error and learn by doing.

Mechanistic approach: If you approach global business purely through process and technology, and you leave out the organic, or the “people part” of the equation, you will never be successful. In most cases, when moving into new territories, the cultural angle is much bigger than you expect.

The “duplication” trap: If you have an S&OP process in place at the country level, and you just repeat that process as you move into multiple countries, you will ultimately end up duplicating data and effort. Some of these decisions should be made at a different level.

How does a company ensure that it doesn’t fall prey to any of these traps when they embark on global expansion? According to Chris, these are the five key principles for strategic execution of global S&OP:

  1. Everyone has a good idea of the decisions for which he or she is responsible.
  2. Important information about the competitive environment gets to headquarters quickly.
  3. Once made, decisions are rarely second-guessed.
  4. Information flows freely across organizational boundaries.
  5. Employees have the information they need to understand the bottom-line impact of their day-to-day choices.

Blueprint for delivering on the five key principles for global S&OP

To ensure that a company can execute on these principles for successful global expansion, Nari advocated for developing a “blueprint” that is flexible and can adapt to local challenges. This blueprint is a fundamental technology enabler, which allows for a standard process, but also can have configurations created that are flexible to the local environment. Nari stated that in many of such engagements, Steelwedge leads the initial processes of scoping, design and implementation, and customers become involved at the validation and deployment stage.

“Adoption of blueprints is not purely a process issue but also a technology issue,” Nari said. “True blueprints are atomic and leveragable across not only companies in the same industry but also across industries.”

In future deployments or enhancements with these customers, the customer takes the lead and Steelwedge takes a backseat. “Getting truly globalized requires the company, through its own leadership activity, to look forward to future deployments for the solution,” Nari said.

You can learn more about becoming “glocal” by viewing the archived webinar here.

What is your experience with the challenges and opportunities inherent in taking your business global while keeping local concerns in mind? We’d love to hear from you in the comments!