“Now, absolutely everyone’s convinced of the value of our new IBP process!” said the IBP manager to a client where we set up an Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process last year. This company is gaining a competitive edge by making smart choices related to market segments, customer focus, production capacity and inventory management with a...
Sales & Operations Planning is essential in organisations with supply chains of any substance. Many companies struggle with it though. A summary of do’s and don’ts. Hans van der Drift is partner with Involvation, a consultancy that focuses on supply chain management. He observes that many organisations struggle with Sales & Operations Planning...
You won’t have missed it: S&OP is a trending topic. There’s no escaping it. If you’re not in, then you’re out! Right? Well, I would be the last person to deny that effective S&OP is essential to successful business. The question, however, is whether you are ready for it. Does your company meet the conditions of effective S&OP? Preventing...
The tenth final of the event known as ‘The Fresh Connection Global PRO Challenge’ was held last month. In this Global PRO Final, 20 company teams from all over the world compete for the title of Global Supply Chain Management Champion plus an illustrious prize: an intensive four-day executive course at MIT in Cambridge, USA. Four demanding...
Selecting a new Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) solution has major implications for a company. A ‘wrong’ or suboptimal choice can have long-lasting consequences for both the implementation project and the business itself. The potential impact, whether positive or negative, is generally substantially greater than any time and money spent on a...
The coronavirus has turned the world upside down and will continue to have a major impact on people’s personal and working lives for the foreseeable future. Some are even claiming that coronavirus is a game changer in the business world, although some sectors will of course be more strongly affected than others. One thing is for sure: many supply...
Implementing S&OP is simple but not easy; balancing supply and demand in the short and medium term should not be too difficult, although practice often shows otherwise. The biggest challenge in most cases is to create a process that adds so much value for the business that lasting buy-in is created from all stakeholders. The next step in S&OP...
'Change is the law of life' “Change is the law of life...” said John F. Kennedy during one of his speeches in 1963. This famous quote is more relevant for organisations today than ever before. The world around them is evolving increasingly quickly and companies are continuously involved in change – or at least they should be. But that’s not easy –...
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...
S&OP is often pictured as a largely standard process; textbook S&OP starts with agreeing an unconstrained demand plan that is handed over to supply planning who need to ensure product availability. In case of important bottlenecks, the S&OP meeting is the final escalation step in the process, where all remaining imbalances should be resolved. ...