More and more companies are finding that their monthly Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) meetings largely revolve around the acute supply chain problems. As a result, they have hardly any time left to discuss medium-term issues. That’s why, during a recentWebinar Wednesday, consulting firm Involvation advocated an additional process that deals...
Fashion company Stichd has an extremely complex planning process. To help the company get a grip on its multi-dimensional supply chain, Involvation set up an advanced planning system consisting of no fewer than eight planning layers. During Supply Chain Media’s S&OP Selection Day, it became apparent that this makes Stichd much more flexible.
S&OP: The essential do’s and don’ts for Sales & Operations Planning Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is indispensable for all organizations with a sizeable goods flow, yet many companies struggle with it. We have put together an overview of essential do’s and don’ts. Hans van der Drift, a partner at Involvation, sees many European...
The urgent need for supply chain resilience is becoming increasingly apparent in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world, so it’s time to take action. In my view, IBP is a great place to start. But what should you bear in mind to ensure that the implementation is successful?
S&OP in the past years has been demystified and has become a mature process with many successful implementations. Companies reap the benefits in terms of higher revenues and margins and improved supply chain performance. We also know that getting there is not straightforward, mainly because S&OP is tactical and cross-functional. Most companies...
“S&OP helps us to seize growth opportunities” – Sabine Zijderlaan Typical S&OP topics: Scaling capacity up and down proactively Responding to expectations faster Providing transparency into workload & priorities Agreeing on when to stimulate or hold back customer demand Aligning execution with strategy
Many articles have been written about successful S&OP implementations. Often these articles only over content or context, hardly ever they cover both. But a successful S&OP demands an integral approach. Only in that case Sales & Operations Planning leads to practical actions and results. Quite similar to playing on chess on multiple boards. A...
As always, this year’s IBP Boost Camp was based on the concept of “learning by doing”: hardly any PowerPoints but getting to work yourself in a realistic but virtual environment. Participants from very diverse companies including Albert Heijn, FrieslandCampina, Nexperia, Brocacef, Shimano, Stedin and Puratos tested their S&OP / IBP skills in “The...
The world has changed For years now, supply chain blogs and articles have invariably begun with a statement about the changing world. There certainly has been been plenty going on in the past years, and even the causes themselves are changing. Whereas we used to be able to blame the increasing uncertainty and volatility on changing consumer...
For any process to work well, the people running it need to have the right skills and competencies and S&OP is no exception. Even when having done an excellent job in creating buy-in and setting-up processes and systems, S&OP will not be effective if the practitioners are not able to execute it.