Steelwedge Webinars

You’re invited to an interactive webinar with Gartner’s lead Supply chain technology analyst, Tim Payne, to take a second look at the priorities and technology selection criteria to optimize your planning process—and impact.

The challenge: the needle hasn’t really moved in years on the goal of better managing forecast accuracy and demand variability—even though nearly $2.8 billion was spent on technologies to address this last year alone.  The Gordian knot lies in how companies address both the challenge and the potential technologies leveraged for the solution.  This session will take a deeper dive into three areas worth a second look on any manufacturer’s planning technologies selection criteria:

 Join us, Friday, June 21st at 9am PDT/12pm EDT/5pm GMT for a live webinar session that picks up a popular discussion Tim started in his address at the May Gartner Supply Chain Summit.

The sheer velocity of change - in business complexity, global volatility and available data is making the prospect of managing regional and global planning a more elusive mission, a bit like hitting a whack-a-mole with a mallet - only to have another pesky problem pop up somewhere else.

This session will explore how to tie together smart strategy and integrated software to capture and scale a process that can out-flex even the gnarliest of planning challenges.

Join S&OP author and educator, Tom Wallace, and Steelwedge VP, Nari Viswanathan, to learn how to:

Recorded May 29th, 2013

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 iPhone, your business’ planning system should allow business planners, partners, and others to build simple ‘apps’ on top of it.  Apps that enable you to embed and scale your unique capabilities and processes, and rapidly evolve them as your business and its needs change.

During this webinar, hear from Stanford educator and supply chain innovator, Dr. Blake Johnson, about the growing imperative to implement and scale differentiating planning capabilities. Discuss the benefits of an S&OP foundation that can be easily augmented –and automated-- with emerging best practice processes and your company’s otherwise unique “off-line” processes.
Join us to learn:

Recorded April 23rd, 2013

Picking up from his popular September Webinar: S&OP Strategy to Bridge the Agility Gap, Chris Turner advances the dialogue on S&OP and the shifting balance of control vs. growth—this time with a look at the prospects and pitfalls of balancing global, regional and local planning and decision making. This interactive session will explore the issues surrounding the globalization paradox and the complexities of the ever flattening (but still lumpy and uneven) world. He’ll take the discussion beyond just geography—to get to the issues that strategic business planning needs to address for enabling growth.

This event will question some traditional S&OP/IBP beliefs that could be hampering your business’ success and will address 7 areas of focus to reset your global potential:

 Recorded February 26th, 2013

Kick off the New Year with perspective from Dennis Omanoff, whose deep experience as Chief Supply Chain officer at some of the High Tech industry's largest manufacturers like Seagate and MacAfee will illuminate a discussion on the hit-and-miss realities of using S&OP to make a difference in High Tech business.  Mr. Omanoff will offer his view and real world examples, of where S&OP strategy, practice and technology could be better used to sense and respond to the changing dynamics that are a particular challenge in the High Tech industry.

Register for this webinar to learn about how you can approach the most overlooked potential of S&OP in High Tech customer value networks: Driving Top Side Revenue.  

Key topics include:

Presenters:
Dennis Omanoff is a well respected leader, consultant and lecturer who has lead end-to-end global supply chains at major multi-billion dollar public companies and start-ups in the Information Security, Networking, Storage, Telecom and Retail sectors.

Nari Viswanathan is the VP of Product Management and Marketing at Steelwedge and was previously the lead Supply Chain analyst at Aberdeen.

Recorded January 15th, 2013

Join Steelwedge as we round up the best of the best in practice, process, and case study lessons learned from a dynamic year of "S&OP Agility" thought leadership webinars.  We'll summarize our favorite insights from industry pundits and practitioners alike.  At this live webinar, you'll learn how the industry's leaders are rethinking, rescoping, and researching how to turn static S&OP planning practices into more agile business opportunities.

As a bonus, we'll give you a peek at the future in terms of what you can-- and should-- be getting from your S&OP technology.

Learn the 5 trends that can power your company's planning in 2013:

Recorded December 11th,  2012

Good news/bad news in Sales & Operations this year:  S&OP has become a top priority for most manufacturing companies; however, too many businesses are still floundering on how to make S&OP work.  While collaboration is at the heart of effective S&OP, creating more meetings is not the solution.  Nor is a rigid pursuit of “the perfect forecast,” or an attempt to ensure control over the supply chain.  Today, the best business plans are the most agile ones, able to adapt to the marketplace.  Therefore, the best S&OP leaders also need to be more agile in how they approach their company’s consensus planning.

So, as you take stock of your business planning priorities for 2013, it’s a good time to also ensure your leadership skills are updated, strong and flexible enough to drive growth in whatever environment the New Year serves up.

In this one hour interactive webinar, acclaimed industry counselor, Tom Wallace, will share his perspective on a checklist of skills the most successful S&OP leaders will need in 2013 to get and keep better agility in their businesses, including:

Recorded November 27, 2012

Enterasys Networks set a strategy for business transformation in 2005 and put in place an S&OP initiative to power it. Within a year, it was reaping multi-million dollar benefits from tighter inventory and better visibility. Seven years later, the company continues to derive powerful incremental value from its S&OP foundation. In fact, Enterasys credits S&OP for ensuring its phenomenal string of q/q growth for the past three years—even when its market suffered a set- back.

Join Jack and Steelwedge for an interactive webinar that looks under the hood that the strategy, execution and union of people, process and technology that keeps Enterasys on a multi-year growth trajectory.

Topics  will include:

Recorded October 23, 2012

Picking up from his popular February Webinar: The S&OP Control Paradox, Chris Turner advances the dialogue on driving sustainable results in a VUCA world.  This interactive session will focus on activating strategy with a growth mindset and how the traditional views of strategy and S&OP/IBP need to be recast to help do that. 

This event will include:

Recorded September 25, 2012

Successful supply chain planning is not just a function of ‘doing more’ leading practices. The best supply chain planning organizations have picked appropriate leading practices as dictated by the markets they serve and integrated them together with their chosen technology platform to achieve competitive advantage.

 Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a foundational leading practice that cuts across all industries, according to Peter Bolstorff, an internationally recognized supply chain practitioner, speaker, educator, consultant and author.  Actionable research from Mr. Bolstorff’s project experience suggests that in addition to S&OP, the best supply chain planning organizations have adopted seven principles:

Recorded August 21, 2012

Great performing companies, like great performing athletes, practice regularly for optimizing “business as usual.”  For planning, 90% of businesses today employ Sales and Operations Planning process to try to keep their businesses conditioned.  Yet, as recent research from Supply Chain Insights underscores: few do it well. There is a 60 point spread between agile aspirations and actual performance. Only 27% of companies think they are agile enough to capitalize in a volatile environment and see around the blind spots of uncertainty.

A difference-maker? Integrated Business Planning and “What If” Scenario Modeling.  In this live webinar, Eric Deutsch, principal with Oliver Wight consulting, and EJ Tavella, VP of Strategic Sales and Solutions, will explore how businesses can:

Recorded June 19, 2012

Companies want to be more agile in driving growth regardless of volatililty in the global business environment. But there is no clear, consistent industry standard definition of business agility. To better understand what this means and how organizations like yours are using S&OP to drive supply chain agility, Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights and former Supply Chain Analyst and Partner with Altimeter Group, conducted a survey of business professionals in April about the importance of agility in business planning . On May 15th, Lora will be sharing her analysis of this research during her featured webinar.

View recorded webinar to learn how others are prioritizing and enabling agility in their organizations. Get tips from Lora and Steelwedge’s VP of Product Marketing, Nari Viswanathan on how you can use S&OP to drive better resilience in your operation.

Recorded May 15, 2012

Most businesses are organization-driven: built to move supply to customers.  Yet in today’s highly volatile global business environment, successful businesses are realigning to become much more agile to adjust to change, with a focus on becoming demand-driven: starting with the customer.  This transformational sea change in Supply Chain strategy needs to be driven top down. It must be collaborative.  It must have an end-to-end S&OP process. And, it should have process-enabling planning technology.

Roddy Martin, SVP Global Supply Chain & Manufacturing Transformation at Competitive Capabilities International and former Supply Chain leader and distinguished analyst at AMR, will lead this interactive session with examples from some of the best demand-driven organizations such as Proctor & Gamble.  He’ll also offer insights for businesses at any stage of demand-driven transformation, including:

Recorded April 11, 2012

The converging forces of internal complexity and external market volatility are driving  business leaders from across the enterprise to look for new, more agile solutions to inform business decisions.  In fact,  90% of attendees at Steelwedge's first Agility Series webinar  in February said change and uncertainty are impacting their ability to do their jobs.

Tom Wallace has found fascinating examples of nimble businesses like Dow, Applied Materials, Procter & Gamble and Staples  using S&OP as the engine for collaboration and decision making for applications far beyond its original scope in supply/demand balancing such as:

Recorded March 13, 2012

On February 7, Steelwedge kicks off its 2012 Agility series of live webcasts with Chris Turner, co-founder of strategy, innovation and operations consulting firm StrataBridge and Ed Lewis, VP of Product Planning at Steelwedge. This session, The S&OP Paradox, will explore where S&OP sits at the cross hairs of planning to plan and planning to change. It will address how to optimize your company's approach to drive growth, regardless if you are new to S&OP, or you are evolving your existing strategy and process.

Recorded February 7, 2012

View recorded webinar to hear thought leader and leading industry analyst Lora Cecere talk about the results from her latest S&OP research report titled "Solving the S&OP Puzzle".

The focus of this thought-provoking webinar will be on highlighting the maturity phases that companies go through with respect to S&OP and the benefits that they gain along the way. Lora has clearly defined five maturity phases to help illustrate this point.

Some of the topics that will be covered are:

1. Discussion of the various stages of S&OP Evolution
   1. Stage 1 - Identifying a Feasible Plan
   2. Stage 2 - Match Demand with Supply
   3. Stage 3 - Drive the Most Profitable Response
   4. Stage 4 - Demand-Driven Supply Chains
   5. Stage 5 - Market-Driven Value Networks
2. Value statement - example of a stage 2 and a stage 5 company
3. Different kinds of technology options available for organizations Nari Viswanathan, VP of Solutions Marketing at Steelwedge, will be moderating this webinar and will also provide his perspective on different technology options as well as process drivers for enhanced S&OP success. There will be a Q&A session at the end where the audience can voice their questions to the speakers.

Recorded  December 13, 2011

If you're wondering about the future of Sales & Operations Planning, it's here already.
Today we see companies using Sales & Operations Planning for purposes far beyond its original missions of balancing demand and supply and integrating financial and operational planning.

View recorded webinar to learn why leading edge companies have made improving their Sales & Operations competency a key focus area, and what they are doing to advance their process maturity.

Recorded  November 30, 2011