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
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
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
‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there‘, Yogi Berra, a famous baseball player famously said. Berra knew how to achieve and win, appearing in 21 world series and winning 13 of them. He was elected to the baseball hall of fame in 1972 (Wikipedia). If we want to achieve something, we usually define our goals, measurements and targets. We usually … Continue reading The main reason why S&OP implementations fail!
S&OP is a long term game, if not a never ending continuous improvement game. More than once, I’ve witnessed well working S&OP processes collapse within months after a merger, restructure, leadership change or other significant business changes. The process was working; people rocked up to meetings and had meaningful conversation. Information was on the table, some business decisions were made. Systems were working to support … Continue reading 7 Steps to Build a Sustainable S&OP Culture
Collaboration is widely accepted to add value to a business network. Yet few companies will say they have truly a collaborative culture. The supply chain function and S&OP process can be catalysts to drive a collaborative company culture. For this to happen, the traditional left brain thinking supply chain organization has to start activating and using right brain skills and S&OP needs to start leading … Continue reading The right brain and S&OP: cornerstones to a collaborative culture
Hi all, as promised in my December blog find my presentation on leading sustainable S&OP here! Sustainable S&OP can only be established when an S&OP culture is created. To create an S&OP culture, effective S&OP behaviours like discipline, common goals, trust, communication and collaboration need to become part of a company DNA. This presentation links some literature on this behaviour with results from my S&OP pulse … Continue reading Leading sustainable S&OP
Here we go again. Almost one and a half years after I wrote a blog saying that the difference between S&OP and IBP is an illusion, a hefty discussion on this topic started again on LinkedIn. This time it is getting a bit more dirty and personal, which seems to be driven from a deep down frustration and a drive to be right on an … Continue reading S&OP leaders, we just don’t get it!
This is the last in a series of four articles on leading an effective S&OP/IBP culture. The first article was on effective S&OP/IBP behaviour. The second article on leading S&OP/IBP change. The third article discussed on how to lead sustainable S&OP/IBP and introduced the ‘S&OP leadership quadrant’. This fourth article is about leading S&OP/IBP across geographies. Leading S&OP/IBP across geographies Once a company starts crossing the borders other complexity … Continue reading Leading S&OP/IBP across geographies
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