I recently watched a TED talk video by Alison Ledgerwood on YouTube. In the video, Alison gives the example of her paper getting accepted for publication (positive news) and another one getting rejected for publication (negative news). She talks about how it takes longer to recover from (i.e., go back to being her normal self) a
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is typically a monthly process. Through a series of detailed planning steps, and usually three meetings, companies define a plan to deal with what they think they can do to meet the demand given their supply and other constraints.
Key Point: A Sales and Operation Planning (S&OP) meeting is a meeting to design the future course of a business. Yet, too many companies spend too much time talking about the past or the current period. I recommend using about 60-70% of the time discussing the future. The (S&OP) process consists of a lot of
You have a favorite forecast accuracy metric(s) you’ve been practicing within the organization for a while, and now you think you are ready to bring it to the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) meeting as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) of your demand planning process. But you are not sure exactly how to go about
Research shows that a majority of mergers fail. A recent study put the percentage as high as 83%. As one would imagine, there are various reasons for this high rate of failure. However, the reasons can be divided into two main groups:
The term ‘optimization’ can and does have different meanings to different groups. For the folks who build and develop scheduling algorithms, creating the best schedule is defined in terms of cost criteria – perfectly logical. For business settings (from manufacturing to hospitals) optimization refers to the entire process. Let’s look at the scheduler’s world to
In my last post, I wrote a little on the importance of extending participation in the sales and operations (S&OP) collaboration process as well as knowing what questions to ask each party. In this blog, I would like to step away from collaborating with internal departments to discuss collaborating with customers.
In my experience with several different companies, it is evident that companies make great decisions some of the time. Unfortunately, being successful only some of the time doesn’t cut it. The key to business success is to make good decisions all of the time. Company success is much like investment success. It requires a disciplined
What-if scenario planning is an excellent technique that allows a planner to ask questions on the future. Given a working model that represents a business, a planner can quickly ask the questions that represent the range of possibilities in the foreseeable future which can render the current plan obsolete.
It was Sir Isaac Newton who told us that things not in motion will continue to be that way until acted upon by an external force. Vice versa, things that were already in motion will continue to move that particular way without a change in direction or speed unless acted upon by an external force.