Analyst Insight: Based on a survey of 160 supply chain leaders in a recent webinar conducted by Steelwedge, we found that companies captured a whopping 70 percent more data (product, supply, demand and finance) to manage their organizations in 2012. Yet, 77 percent of these businesses are not actually leveraging this data in their S&OP processes, thereby leaving "blind spots" in their decision making processes around critical supply/demand trade-offs.
- Nari Viswanathan, Vice President of Product Management, Steelwedge
Analyst Insight: For the past 30 years, sales and operations planning (S&OP) has been espoused by the Oliver Wight organization based on its founder's concepts. It has manifested itself to include inventory (SIOP) and has morphed into integrated business planning (IBP). However, only within the last five years, has it been heralded and crossed the chasm to mainstream business practice. We think it may only be the tip of the iceberg though, not the core solution to step-change improved performance. - Rich Sherman, Supply Chain Discipline Expert at Trissential
Analyst Insight: While much has been written about demand driven, daily demand variability drives operations crazy. Most current inventory planning and optimization applications are disconnected from daily reality resulting in operations relying on custom spreadsheets and tribal knowledge to reconcile the gaps between plan and actual. In addition, the inventory planning applications are often disconnected from the optimization applications (if implemented at all), further exacerbating the operations conundrum. - Rich Sherman, Supply Chain Discipline Expert at Trissential
A functioning demand-planning process is a key enabler for supply chain organizations, and getting the process right is fundamental to improving demand-planning effectiveness, according to Gartner analysts.
There are two major challenges that companies face today in forecasting, says Bob Leonard, vice president of sales with Forecast Pro. One is the push to drive down to more detail, including smaller time buckets. The other is the need to treat forecasting as an analytical task, instead of just clerical work.
Discrete manufacturing companies operating with highly complex supply chains in today's volatile business world need collaborative planning and the ability to quickly respond to variances in those plans. They often want to model 'what-if' scenarios to better prepare them for those inevitable hiccups - or new business.
Kinaxis designed its RapidResponse solution to help companies with demand and supply balancing, optimized forecasting, and improved supply chain performance. Recently it debuted an enhanced version called RapidResponse Control Tower.
In 2012, three decades of supply chain management have passed. It is time to learn from history and look forward. I feel that organizations need to train for supply chain 2020.
With sales of roughly half a billion dollars, Dorman Products is one of the world's leading manufacturers of automotive parts for the aftermarket, selling more than 100,000 distinct products. The company has experienced sharp growth over the past four years, says director of corporate forecasting Donald H. Mitchell. Recently, it saw the need to transform its demand-planning process, in order to create "a more transparent environment."