Overview. Fortune 1000 sales executives are managing top-line revenue, optimizing margins, and improving their overall sales performance with Steelwedge Software. They have turned to Steelwedge because they realized that, despite investments in ERP, CRM, and BI solutions, they were unsuccessful in fully controlling the planning around the lifeblood of their enterprise -- revenue.
Steelwedge helps companies gain top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out
control over every aspect of the revenue planning process with an easy to
use exception-based approach tailored to the needs of individual sales organizations. This approach leverages encompasses three dynamic
planning tactics:
1-- Revenue Planning—Sales revenue planning involves connecting the dots between CRM-based sales opportunity information, detailed transaction
history, field sales feedback, and product management business plans.
Typical demand-driven planning processes include Sales Forecasting, Sales & Operations Planning, Sales Revenue and Margin Planning, Sales Opportunity Planning, Sales Opportunity Configuration Planning, Design-Win-Build Planning, and, Account Planning.
2-- Performance Management—Sales performance management drives accountability and improves the effectiveness of field sales organizations
while providing dramatically improved operational performance visibility to senior management, sales management, demand planners, and financial analysts. In order to improve operational effectiveness Steelwedge offers powerful exception management tools including exception-based email
alerts, personalized email-driven performance dashboards, multi-dimensional waterfall reports, and prioritized plan tracking reports.
3-- Plan Collaboration—Effective collaboration is an imperative for any
planning process. Steelwedge fosters a new generation of collaboration that is easy-to-use, automatic, and effective. Not only does Steelwedge support
internal collaboration across business functions such as sales, operations, and finance, but Steelwedge also offers a practical method for collaboration with suppliers, partners, and distributors. By leveraging Enterprise-Enabled Excel and combining it with emerging Web Services technologies, Steelwedge
offers users a solution that is functional both offline and online. In addition, Steelwedge collaboration automates the “bird-dogging” process that can consume an organization by providing organizational accountability, automating the distribution of plan templates, and reminding users to
update their plans.
I—Sales Planning: Architecting the Net Income Line
Top-line revenue impact and optimized margins are why Fortune 1000 companies choose Steelwedge for forecasting, demand planning and
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP). The Steelwedge approach methodology has been developed and refined via the practical synthesis of academic
work in the field of sales planning and forecasting and continuous input from top performing sales leaders.
Sales executives using Steelwedge are never at a loss as to how to control
and tune input to their sales plans and manage their team. With Steelwedge they can identify changes in sales opportunities; evaluate the impact of mix on profitability; evaluate alternate scenarios and make time-phased adjustments to their costs or average selling price assumptions. This is all accomplished within easy-to-use excel-based dashboards. Steelwedge not only drives the production of a solid plan; it makes field sales guidance easier to dispense
and, through its efficient 360-degree view of the enterprise, supports sales teams in doing their part to improve net income.
Companies can drive Sales & Operations Planning processes, establish their annual sales plan and transform what had previously been considered “noise” in into valuable input-streams that provide sales executives with three of the most difficult elements to achieve in any enterprise-wide planning process:
1. A reconciled, top-down, bottom-up, middle-out view into sales plan performance
2. A detailed understanding of the factors impacting ongoing performance
3. The ability, through scenarios, to understand what steps are needed to realign performance with the annual plan and what is required to plan for contingencies
Sales Planning Benefits
Automate and Improve your Sales & Operations Planning Process
Demand- and supply-side volatility necessitates that (1) supply availability be balanced with consensus demand plans to (2) prioritize orders and set customer expectations. Historically, this “balancing act” has been reactive – a mad dash by sales, marketing, and operations teams to allocate constrained products to customer orders. This usually involves the costly expediting of product shipments or the reconfiguration of products to create the models demanded by customers.
“Reactive” can be replaced with “Proactive” as a catch phrase to describe S&OP planning with Steelwedge. Using Steelwedge enables executives not only to agree on goals that are both feasible and profitable; it helps in the cross-enterprise improvement of communications, teamwork and accountability.
Manage Scenarios.
Steelwedge enables you to quickly and easily create and manage multiple scenarios. Typical what-if analyses and scenarios involve planning for demand, supply, ASP, revenue, product mix and margin changes.
Ensure a Single View of Enterprise Information.
Maintaining a single plan of record enables you to measure success, understand mistakes, quickly identify trends, and track plan changes over time (waterfall analysis). The Steelwedge Corporate Plan of Record provides a single repository which can be easily mined and includes both qualitative and quantitative feedback
Shape Demand Proactively.
Steelwedge enables users to manage demand for improved profitability and customer success. By proactively identifying exceptions, anticipating change, and aligning sales efforts with supply strategy, improved revenue and bottom line profitability are assured.
II—Performance Management: Leveraging SFA and CRM
Improving sales performance and ensuring higher levels of focus on revenue and customer relationships are critical to corporate success. Steelwedge enables its customers to leverage their existing investments in sales force automation (SFA and CRM) tools and ERP to dramatically improve sales performance management.
Determining which actions improve your organization’s performance has never been an easy task; it requires a deep understanding of the factors that influence performance. Many times that understanding is resident in only a select few people in the organization. With the speed at which decisions must be made today, those “select few” are bottlenecks; simple (or ultra-complex IT-owned) reports will never bridge the gap.
In order for performance to permeate an organization, participation and understanding must exist, in a robust fashion, across it. Invariably, in fast moving organizations, our research shows that many executives feel that they are flying with less than fifty percent visibility. These leaders find it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues, identify business opportunities, or make truly informed decisions.
Steelwedge provides the expertise, waterfall planning, exception alerts, and accountability tools required to improve sales effectiveness. Steelwedge sales performance management capabilities bring context and direction to your sales decision-making processes. In short, Steelwedge not only helps manage organizational performance–it improves it.
Performance Management Benefits
Align resources with strategies. When you understand which measures
drive your business, you can begin to align operations toward those drivers. Predictive score-carding capabilities let you tie traditional scorecard features
to powerful analytics.
Synchronize financial and operational strategies.
Collaborate on the development of scenarios and associated budgets.
With one integrated solution for sales planning, budgeting and reporting, Steelwedge gives you the ability to create more frequent, accurate forecasts, ensure transparency and publish reports more quickly.
Dynamic consolidation also ensures that the latest information is always available for decision makers and regulatory agencies.
Quickly respond to business and market changes. At-a-glance dashboard visuals ensure that you have the most efficient access to your organization’s current sales status. Automatic alerts inform you immediately of important events. You can also view cause-and-effect relationships between events, which help illustrate results in the proper context. A diagram editor makes it easy for you to visualize strategies and process flows. All these capabilities
are offered through one integrated Steelwedge solution.
III—Plan Collaboration: Automated and Easy
Collaboration works when the process is transparent: no new software to learn, no online requirements, mobile enabled, no added workload and no distractions from the tasks at hand. While other vendors approach collaboration as a retrofitted afterthought to their demand-forecasting
offering, Steelwedge engineered collaborative planning into its core.
Fortune 1000 customers have been successful with Steelwedge because
of its rapid adoption: in three words--it just works. Using tools familiar to users not only determines early success -- the most critical stage of any enterprise application’s deployment – it enables information sharing to begin immediately.
In addition to the automated distribution of enterprise-wide performance dashboards via excel and outlook, Enterprise Enabled Excel (E3) tailors the information in dashboards to allow individual sales executives to privately examine and manage their own performance. The same platform opens those same tools to deliver their real-time feedback and updates back to the enterprise, whether that input is provided on- or off-line.
Fortune 500 companies that use spreadsheets for planning and collaboration
Plan Collaboration Benefits
Share Excel Spreadsheets
With Steelwedge collaboration is possible both inside and outside the firewall. Never again will you have to manually email a spreadsheet out to your partner or sales organization and then reformat to manually export each of several
hundred spreadsheets back into your ERP system. Moreoever, with Steelwedge technology, distribution and aggregation is automatic. Because Steelwedge delivers collaborative Enterprise Enabled Excel spreadsheets via email and supports offline interaction, user participation is greatly increased.
Centrally Aggregate and Archive Plan Changes
Steelwedge solutions allow you to leverage your existing enterprise infrastructure to create a Corporate Plan of Record that can vastly improve your revenue planning, sales plans, sales performance reporting, revenue recognition management, sales quota management, sales operations support, demand plans, sales forecasts, new product introduction plans, revenue and margin plans and Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) processes.
Steelwedge gives you the visibility, control and accountability you need to quickly respond to changes in the marketplace, as well as regulatory compliance and Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Furthermore, Steelwedge enables you to improve sales force effectiveness and enforce accountability across your sales organization.
What Customers say about Steelwedge
'We needed to streamline our planning processes and reduce planning
cycle time across all our divisions. After a thorough evaluation of various vendors, we selected the Steelwedge solution for its ability to drive a consensus planning process in an organization of our size and complexity. We were also very impressed with the powerful yet very easy to use and implement planning framework offered by Steelwedge.' - Stu Reekie, Global Process Manager, Integrated Supply Chain at Air Products.
'The Steelwedge solution leveraged our investment in SAP and enabled us
to move from planning in disconnected organizational silos to a collaborative planning process. As a result, we were able to improve our forecast accuracy, move from a quarterly planning cycle to a monthly planning cycle and significantly reduce our missed-revenue opportunity costs, while lowering inventory costs. In addition, our planning process has been dramatically streamlined - we have gained more control over the planning process, eliminated the use of spreadsheets and our analysts are spending time analyzing information instead of chasing data.'
- Seema Phull, Director of Process and Technology at Enterasys Networks
About the Author:
Glen Margolis is Founder & CEO at Steelwedge Software.
Glen is a veteran of multiple startups and founded a successful contract manufacturing organization. He was a senior supply chain strategy consultant with Mercer Management Consulting and Ernst & Young. Glen holds a Bachelor’s in Engineering from the Webb Institute and a Masters in Finance from Harvard University.
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