From my perspective, supply chain management (SCM) and sales and operations planning (S&OP) are two of the most underappreciated disciplines of modern corporate management. Properly applied, they can improve performance and competitiveness by increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs. A combination of more capable information technology with advances in operations research and analytics has made managing supply and demand chains potentially more impactful by making them more flexible and adaptable to market conditions. Consequently, companies can enhance profitability, reduce working capital and improve customer satisfaction by providing more reliable service.
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Topics:
ERP,
Kinaxis,
Supply Chain Planning,
Analytics,
SCM,
S&OP,
Sales and Operations Planning,
supply chain management,
procurement
I recently attended Kinaxis’ users’ group meeting and learned some interesting things. The company, which has been around since 1995, provides software for large corporations with complex supply chains. Over the past decade its product has evolved well past its roots as a material requirements planning (MRP) support tool. It is now an analytics suite that facilitates supply and demand planning, analysis and optimization with a focus on sales and operations planning (S&OP). This is a discipline that is much talked about but less well practiced, done effectively by only a handful of very large companies (Cisco, for example) and smaller ones that have defined their functional strategy around S&OP and logistics management. In our S&OP benchmark research, we assessed the degree to which companies have a broad cross-functional representation in the process (a critical aspect of an effective S&OP effort) by asking which parts of the business were involved. When it comes to five of the most important ones – executive management, manufacturing, operations, sales and finance – our research showed that only 21 percent of companies have four or five participating, while 45 percent of companies have none or just one.
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Topics:
Planning,
Sales,
Office of Finance,
Operational Performance Management (OPM),
Budgeting,
Kinaxis,
Business Analytics,
Business Collaboration,
Cloud Computing,
Business Performance Management (BPM),
Financial Performance Management (FPM),
Sales Performance Management (SPM),
Supply Chain,
Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM),
demand management,
Integrated Business Planning,
S&OP
