AI and human intervention During my time at MIT, I had the privilege of attending lectures by Jay W. Forrester, the founder of system dynamics. Forrester was a pioneer in modeling complex systems in economics, business, and technology. He was one of the first to recognize how technology could enhance decision-making and planning, yet he always...
Thou Shalt Not... Misuse S&OP/IBP Disruptions and rapidly changing circumstances have become the norm over the past few years. It makes sense that many companies have started to focus more on short-term management, closely monitoring the balance between demand and supply in short cycles. While a typical S&OP/IBP process is applied in a monthly...
Despite being aware of the need to take an end-to-end view of the value chain and the importance of cross-functional decision-making, many businesses are still structured around ‘functional silos’. This results in internal operational barriers that hold back the efficient and effective value chain performance needed to cope with today’s...
Resilience has become a popular term after all the major events happened throughout the world last five years. These events have had a lot of indirect effects within economies and thus impacted the playground for almost all companies. It has pushed the need for resilience on the agendas on board level and more specifically have become targets for...
Uncertainty is a fact of life within the supply chain nowadays. In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, organizations need to be resilient in order to safeguard their long-term future in the face of ever-changing circumstances. This calls for new organizational structures, but also for employees with different skills...
Last spring, I ran my first marathon in Rotterdam. My goal was mainly to complete it entirely without a specific finishing time in mind. In my work, I spend a lot of time implementing Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) processes. Here too, it is mainly about a good implementation rather than a speedy one. And there are many more parallels to be...
Supply chain development is essential for a fast-growing brand like Rituals. Building on a long-term partnership, Involvation and Rituals launched the first Rituals Supply Chain Academy in 2023. Here, Jeroen Scheepers, Partner at Involvation, explores the Academy’s co-design around Rituals’ end-to-end supply chain, and why a supply chain...
Employee development is essential for strong supply chains — and for your organization’s business continuity and growth. “The supply chain is the backbone of an organization. You need to get all functions, but also suppliers and customers, involved to make impact across the whole chain,” explains Stefan Hoogervorst, director of Involvation’s...
In 2023, Involvation and Rituals launched the brand’s first bespoke talent development initiatives to advance its supply chain. This was the latest phase in a long-standing, productive collaboration: Rituals first started working with Involvation in 2016, on supply chain and business technology projects. Here, Elise Broekhuisen, Head of Supply...
The idea behind Involvation’s IBP event was to organise an interactive workshop with a small group of SOP-IBP professionals. Shortly after registration started, we found that our office building would not be big enough, indicating that IBP is high on the agenda in many companies!