It is Saturday morning 8.18 am here in Melbourne and I read that River Logic just put me in their top 10 must read Supply Chain blogs for 2016. Of course I’m very pleased and honoured with this. River Logic correctly calls out that ‘my twist’ is a focus on mindset and behaviours in combination with strategy execution and S&OP. I also just realized we still … Continue reading S&OP & behaviours: we got a long way to go
Not too long ago I sat down with a software vendor. He showed me a very interesting demand and promotional planning tool. It was user-friendly, collaborative with workflows and well integrated financially. Then it happened: ‘This is our Integrated Business Planning tool’, he said. I said; ‘That’s not IBP, or at least, I have a different definition’. After a longer chat he came around and … Continue reading How marketing is killing Integrated Business planning
The S&OP pulse check 2015 results are ready. Thanks to everybody who has made this yearly recurring S&OP survey since 2010 possible again this year. The S&OP pulse Check is unique because: it really only takes 5 minutes of your time it is yearly recurring, so trends can be identified it is open source. The raw anonymous survey data is made available no BS! Made … Continue reading S&OP Pulse Check 2015 Results
In one of my S&OP pulse check surveys, I asked participants the following question; ‘Do you believe there is a difference between S&OP and IBP?’ Most (48%) of the 120 survey participants believe there is a difference. 20% answered ‘don’t know’ and the remaining 32% believed there is no difference. The answers made me realize I actually don’t know any widely acknowledged definition for IBP. And … Continue reading A new definition for Integrated Business Planning
A lot gets written about S&OP maturity and how S&OP has soft benefits like improved teamwork and collaboration. Soft S&OP benefits like leadership, cultural and behavioral changes related to S&OP are important. In the end, S&OP is just a bunch of processes, meetings and information which has to be given meaning by people to get value out of it. A lot of the S&OP improvements … Continue reading Three Critical Soft Benefits you get with S&OP Experience
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is a 30 year old horizontal business management process that provides executives with forward visibility on how their business is expected to perform against budget and strategy. Many companies have implemented an S&OP process and continuously improved to aim for the highest level of S&OP maturity and create business value. Although there are plenty of S&OP maturity models around to … Continue reading The 6 Ultimate Signs of S&OP process maturity
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon, which occurs when a group of people, in which the desire for harmony results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Teams suffering from groupthink, minimize conflict and create an ‘ingroup’ mentality that rejects challenges to current viewpoints, decisions, or the addressing of controversial issues from the ‘outgroup’. We need discussion and challenge, so these are behaviours that need to … Continue reading How to prevent Groupthink in S&OP meetings
In the corporate world you can drown in meetings. Estimates are, that if you’re a middle manager, you can spend about 35% of your time in meetings. If you’re in upper management, that goes up to 50%. Check out this meeting info-graph. When we spend all this time in meetings, you would think that we run them efficiently and effectively. You might assume that we … Continue reading 8 tips to stop wasting time in meetings
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) as a business process is just over 30 years old. A lot has been written about why S&OP implementations succeed or fail and why many organization are stuck in their maturity. Recently Supply Chain Insights published a report with the following 5 top challenges on why S&OP is a tough nut to crack. 72% has difficulty getting to the right … Continue reading The dirty little secrets of S&OP
There is no doubt that over the years, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has brought companies around the world many valuable business improvements. This article argues that after existing for over 30 years, the development of S&OP as an end to end business management process method has come to a standstill. This standstill is threatening the very existence of S&OP. The only way to further … Continue reading The rise and fall of S&OP
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