Webinar featuring Chris Turner of StrataBridge
Thursday, December 16 at 4:00 p.m. GMT

Register here!
What does Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) mean to you and your company? Do you know if your demand and supply decisions are in sync with your organization’s strategic priorities? Is it possible to align your S&OP process with the big picture without getting bogged down with the many details in the “process”?

Sales and supply chain decision making is complicated – particularly in today’s era of demand volatility and complex, global supply chains. Every stakeholder in the sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain needs to be queried and considered. Forecasts and assumptions need to be checked, particularly when managers are used to relying on past performance and gut feel. You will likely find yourself spending long hours gathering the necessary data before you can even begin weighing the many sales and supply chain trade-offs at your disposal Is this the best way to spend your time? What if you could optimize the process so that you and your S&OP team can quickly and confidently determine the best way forward for your company?

Chris Turner, co-founder of strategy and change management consulting firm StrataBridge, is set to inspire us to stop fretting about process details and dive right into decision-making mode in a webcast entitled “Forget the S&OP Process … Start Making Decisions!” scheduled for Thursday, December 16 at 4:00 p.m. GMT. You can learn the answers to these questions and more when he teams up with John Sookias, Vice President of International Sales and Managing Director (EMEA) of Steelwedge, to discuss powerful ways to connect strategic planning with operational decision making.

In this webinar, you’ll discover how to view S&OP through a lens of the…

“It’s all about getting more chicken boots…fast.”

Unexpected events can have a profound impact supply chains.  Take the BP gulf oil spill.  Nobody could have predicted this event, the length of time needed to stop the flow of oil or the impact on surrounding communities.  A disaster which continues to impact many thousands of lives.

A major US industrial goods company supplies a wide variety of products to meet numerous industrial needs.  I spoke with an executive at the company about the oil spill.  He said, “We supply hundreds of cleaning products.  None exemplifies the supply chain challenge more than chicken boots.”  “Chicken boots?”, I asked.  He replied, “chicken boots are the name we use to describe knee-high, yellow rubber boots.  For the gulf oil spill, the clean-up workers are provided chicken boots and rags.  They mop up the oil and at the end of the day, dispose of the chicken boots.  The next day, they do it again with new chicken boots.”  The demand for chicken boots went stratospheric. 

The immediate challenge was to make more boots.  Many more boots.  Overtime, raw material expedites, whatever necessary.  But one must ask, is that all we can do?  Are we relegated to simply reacting to life’s unexpected challenges?

Forecasters address such challenges by looking at many variables to make the most accurate future predictions.  Did they predict the need for chicken boots?  No way.  Missed it by a mile.  Why?  Because there was nothing in the past that would have suggested that an oil spill of this magnitude could persist for such a protracted period.

Is there something else we can do?

 
Sales and Operations Planning affords us an ability to look beyond forecasts.  A well-designed, effective S&OP process enables participants to view scenarios in advance and plot various…

If you had the perfect S&OP tool, would you use it?

I recently presented at the Demand and Sales Forecasting Forum at the University of Tennessee. More evident than ever, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has become the number one topic of discussion. The S&OP discussion typically touches these three areas:
1. Tools
2. Training
3. Adoption

An executive once said to me, “what’s tough about adoption? Just tell them they have to do it!” While top level executive support is crucial, dictating collaboration is like mandating world peace.

There’s an old idiom, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” When it comes to S&OP, having the right tools and training is not enough. Users must welcome the change as an improvement for the company, their department or themselves.

Selecting the right collaborative planning solution is critical. Steelwedge has been the market leader for years and understands that the tool alone is not sufficient. Users must be trained in both the use of the tool and how it fits in their process. Too often, new tools and training are abandoned by users because they did not adopt the tool as an integral part of their process. And why did they resist the tool? It was either too complex or not complex enough. Yes Goldilocks, the bed was too hard AND too soft! The paradoxical answer is that the tool must be BOTH simple and powerful.

Herein lies the true challenge of S&OP. Cross-functional collaboration. How do you get disparate groups of individuals to agree on the tools and processes necessary to drive successful S&OP? The answer varies for each organization. Yet, we see repeatedly that organizations must:
1. Define effective and efficient collaborative processes
2. Select tools that…

Attributes are often needed to plan the supply and demand of products that are built-to-order or required to meet complicated engineering specifications. What is new, is the way that Steelwedge seamless enables companies with complex configured products to manage their Sales and Operations Planning process using this approach.

Examples of the types of companies that benefit from this approach include those that manufacture products such as servers (disk drives, processor type, etc), network switches (type, size, capacity, memory), and electrical components (different voltages, capacities and fittings).

Engineered products drive higher margins and premium prices because they meet the actual requirements of customers and halt the profit-eroding impact of products which are commodities. Steelwedge customers use attributes not only for Demand and Supply Planning but also for S&OP thereby enabling companies to better track and plan their high margin products.

For S&OP, attribute-based planning is used to translate market demand into demand for a specific group of products that an organization sells. At the order level, attribute planning determines which products are used to satisfy demand.

Furthermore, Steelwedge customers use attributes to describe the engineering specifications, code-date of manufacture, lot id, and color to support specific customer needs. Environmental concerns, safety concerns, and quality concerns also drive customers to prefer specific suppliers for a product. Attribute-based planning has enabled some Steelwedge customers to drive higher prices and better manage their inventories.