After a number of sessions on leadership and change management in S&OP, it was time for a more technical central theme of the S&OP Professionals meeting on November 20th. Involvation facilitates these interactive sessions twice per year, aiming to exchange experiences in S&OP, learn from each other and create a peer network of S&OP practitioners. The selected subject “system support and selection” certainly proved interesting for the invitees, with an excellent participation of ASML, Diversey, Shimano, Wavin, LambWeston, Canon and PepsiCo to name a few.
The workshop was kicked-off by Marco Bachrach, Sr. Solution Team Manager Supply Chain Planning at ASML, who explained how ASML selected a new tool to support its S&OP process. SAP IBP was an obvious candidate since the company runs SAP ERP, but still ASML ran an extensive process to investigate which solutions could meet all its specific requirements.
Marco’s presentation was followed by an interactive session on data requirements and best practices in S&OP dashboarding and templates. Time was short, so we may decide to continue best practice sharing in the next workshop.
Last part of the session was facilitated by Hans van der Drift, partner at Involvation, who gave an overview of the current systems landscape and how to identify best fit solutions. Main message of the introduction was that simply checking (claimed) system functionalities against functional requirements does not do the job anymore; most modern systems meet many of the common requirements and in theory should be up to the job. Although this is obviously a positive development, it also means that a successful selection process has to dig deeper now and will also have to explore how these systems meet all requirements. Besides, softer aspects like vendor culture, planners’ maturity and ability may be as important as the “hard” functionalities and need to match sufficiently to ensure a successful implementation.
The highly interactive workshop ended with an informal drink in the main mansion of country estate De Horst. The next S&OP Professionals workshop will be planned in June 2018.
For more information please contact Hans van der Drift, h.vddrift@involvation.com
