For residents of the Randstad region, Stedin is a familiar name. As the regional grid operator for Utrecht, most of South Holland, and—more recently—Zeeland, Stedin plays a key role in enabling the Dutch energy transition. The challenge? The grid must be expanded at record speed, but there aren’t always enough people or resources to meet that...
Imagine this: the planning system decides to send your entire stock of hand soap to a DC in Zwolle… right when there’s a big promotion running at a major retailer in the south. No one saw it coming. Trust is gone. One wrong move and you’re back to square one: Excel open, AI off.
Digital planning is high on the agenda for many IT and supply chain directors. They often ask themselves ‘What’s the next step?’, ‘Which tooling should we use?’ and ‘How should we tackle the implementation?’ – and they usually consider those questions in that order. I would like to suggest reversing the order of the questions. First ask yourself...
To help organizations recognize and effectively deal with good and bad variability, Involvation has developed theWheel of Fivefor Supply Chain Management. This third part in a series of five articles is about effective decision-making.
In the chemical industry, the average S&OP process has a relatively high degree of maturity compared with other sectors. Nevertheless, chemical companies still face certain challenges when progressing from S&OP to IBP. We distinguish between the two as follows: S&OP is the decision-making process for ensuring the feasibility of the commercial...
The technology behind bitcoin is gradually finding its way into the supply chain domain; pilot applications of blockchain are hitting the headlines almost every week. For many of these pilot cases, however, it is still hard to see the added value. In my view, the added value of these pilots primarily lies in helping the industry to understand...
Sometimes you learn about new ideas that are so logical that you think by yourself: why did I not come up with this myself? Recently I heard about a new app that enables you to pay for your visit to an amusement park, based on the time spent in the park. So as a visitor you no longer pay a fixed fee – which in the past forced you to spend the...
A new year is always an opportunity for a fresh start. When making my new year’s resolutions for 2018, I first took stock of what I am happy/unhappy with in my daily life, before deciding what I want to change and how to do so. In our assessments, we basically apply the same logic when supporting our customers in their journey from Sales &...
Implementation of a Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process is often considered as an important change in the way an organisation works. Therefore, an implementation project should take a solid approach that addresses all the success factors involved in that change. But the last step in the change approach is often neglected:...
Some companies have a well-developed sales & operations planning (S&OP) process as a safeguard for structured decision-making. Those companies take an integral view of supply and demand, including the financial impact of mediumterm risks. The managers of such companies make results-based decisions and are truly at the helm. Supply Chain Media and...