The Chips are Down, Now What?
With each passing day, the news seems to get worse – Chip makers faced a 29% drop in demand in January, PC makers are suffering, Dell continues to cut-back, Spansion files for Chapter 11. Now what?
What on earth does one do to manage through times that seem to be impossibly difficult? Where to start?
Our perspective is that the sooner or later the pain will end. Even for chip makers, there is base demand for the technology that drives global living. But, how does one predict when the patient will stop bleeding? When does the sales forecast inflect? When does demand finally start matching potential supply – when does one stop cutting?
While it is impossible to predict the future, reducing latency in decision making through effective sales and operations planning (S&OP), creating a truly integrated business planning process by integrating financial planning with S&OP, and updating plans weekly if not daily is an imperative.
In the old work, the idea of listening to field sales and operationalizing that feedback into the integrated planning process was a luxury. In today’s brave new world, it is mandatory.
Incorporating both qualitative and quantitative inputs into the planning process and carefully evaluating the early warning signals providing by oppotunity tracking and CRM tools such as Salesforce.com (SFDC) is now a survival skill.
Obtaining a wholistic view of the world by connecting historic buying patterns provided by ERP systems such as SAP with current opportunity feedback provided by Salesforce, evaluating financial plans creating by planning tools such as SAP BPC or Oracle Hyperion with current state S&OP plans is fundamental. The good news today is that a handful of companies have created software-as-a-service, pay-as-you-go offerings to support these planning processes.
Steelwedge software’s Executive S&OP offering is unique in so much as it enables companies to improve there planning processes in as little as 60 days. While 60 days can seem like a lifetime in today’s economy, improved planning is clearly a survival issue.
To quote Benjamin Franklin, “an investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
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