Over the past 5 weeks, Jeff Ondria has hosted a set of short interviews on LinkedIn about the five distinct steps to develop an effective S&OP process. In today's blog, we discuss step 4 Balancing Supply & Demand where we will answer some key questions with respect to balancing supply and demand.
Arm your supply chain planners with the right software tools so they can turn your data into better business decisions.
Taking the time to perform what-if analyses on a regular basis with real and speculative events, gives planners tremendous insight into what parts of the supply chain are most sensitive to changes. As a result, planners will have a sense of what is a big deal and what is not. And when a crisis happens, they’ll feel confident in their ability to respond.
For your business to effectively carry out the supply chain planning process, you will need to link up your short-term and medium-term, to the executive level S&OP plan so that it drives your tactical planning and operational planning.
Making the business case for Sales and Operations planning is not always easy given that you will need to bring on board key decision-makers in your organization. Let us explore how one can go about making the business case for a proposed S&OP project.
With strong leadership by the executive team, over time, the business begins to think in terms of overall health and welfare of the company, rather than optimizing a function at the expense of the overall company benefits.
Are you avoiding these common data visualization pitfalls during your S&OP meetings?
A look at some of the S&OP implementation best practices for managing your data. Now I’m not going to say, “Ask not what your data can do for you, but ask what you can do for your data.” In the past, I was under the impression that going through a system implementation process of setting up product hierarchies would mark the end of the process. I must now say, there’s more to the story.
A little over a year ago, I ventured into the unchartered territory of supply chain planning. It was an exciting challenge. I had experience as a marketer in the Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) space. And because ERP solutions often have some supply chain planning functionalities, I thought I could easily apply my knowledge from the ERP space to supply chain planning.
Almost three decades ago Sales and Operational Planning (S&OP) became the innovation in manufacturing and supply chain. When S&OP came about in 1987 as a concept, we did not yet have the internet much less the “internet of things.”
