Previous Webcasts--
Sales & Operations Planning--Leveraging Next Generation Technology
Wednesday, February 22, 2006, 1pm Eastern,
10am Pacific
Principal Speakers
Len Couture, Managing Director, GrowthCircle—Boston;
Craig Thomas, CTOs, Steelwedge Software
Click here to view recording

Guidelines for S&OP in the Multi-site Enterprise
Wednesday, January 11, 2006, 2pm Eastern, 11am Pacific
Principal Speakers
Share Green, Director,
Program Management, Teledyne Technologies EMS ,
Glen Margolis, SVP Services, Steelwedge Software
Click here to view recording


Three Keys to Successful S&OP
Wednesday, October 26, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific
Principal Speakers
Tim Vaio, Managing VP,
Hitachi Consulting
Seema Phull, Director
Process & Technology,
Enterasys Network
Click here to view recording

Sandhill.com Nov 28, 2005
A Hybrid Strategy for
On-Demand Success
By Timothy Campbell, President/CEO
Steelwedge Software

Manufacturing Business Technology (MBT) November 2005
Cover Story: Balancing Supply & Demand
By Sidney Hill, Jr.

Baseline Magazine (11/08/05)
Air Products in the Pipeline
By Mel Duval, 11/08/05

START Magazine July-August 2005
Looking Forward: Forecasting and Consensus Planning
By Christine Pfefferle, Director of Global Demand and
Order Management

Turbo Charging Your Sales Forecasting Process
By Anil Gupta, The Applications Marketing Group

The Sales Funnel - a Critical Part of the Demand Planning Process
By EJ Tavella, Senior Director
of Business Development, Steelwedge Software

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When is a Next Generation Forecasting and Planning System Required?

It is a sad fact of life, but most Demand Forecasting and Planning [1] systems cannot do everything you would like them to do. The question then becomes - does the current planning system effectively address your most important business issues? This article discusses some of those important business issues, including the cost of ignoring or over-simplifying them and puts them into real-world context.

Realizing there are short-comings in existing demand forecasting and planning system(s), executives have to choose one of the following options:

• Ignore the shortcomings and live with what they have
• Perform analysis in a system outside of the existing planning system, e.g., offline analysis in Excel
• Upgrade existing planning systems (if feasible)
• Invest in a next-generation Demand Forecasting and Planning System designed to address your specific requirements.  
  
  
  

How to Extend SAP to Create a Global, Integrated S&OP Process

In the latest Supply Chain Council’s SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference) model (version 7.0), S&OP is accentuated as one of the most important best practices in supply chain management (see Appendix, Note 3). Air Products’ challenge has been to deploy this key business process across various business units, in all regions of the world, and with different stages of deployment of SAP.
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In most companies, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a tactical plan(1) designed to align the business by balancing supply and demand. It is a key business process in manufacturing companies.

The process varies greatly across companies; from simple, semi-regular meetings to an on-going, structured process with automated data integration that aligns the enterprise in one plan of record. Appendix 1 provides a summary of the evolutionary path from “Basic” to current “Best Practices” in S&OP.