Every so many years, a new supply chain terminology takes the front page and dominates the conversation in magazines and conferences. In the last decade or two we’ve seen JIT (Just in Time), TQM (Total Quality Management), 6 Sigma, S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning), Lean, Agile, Demand-Driven Supply Chains…to name just a few. Often it is for good reasons that these concepts draw attention, as … Continue reading Big Data: a Big Decision
Preview In our busy day to day work life, we can easily forget that the main reason why companies exist is to fulfil their purpose and vision. According to the article “Building your company’s vision” by Collins and Porras (1996), a company’s vision exists from core values, core purpose, a BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) and a vivid description. In principle anything a company and its … Continue reading A Planning Framework in Support of a Company Vision
In an extensive review of S&OP literature, Tuomikangas & Kaipia* suggest S&OP culture and leadership as one of six S&OP mechanisms to improve S&OP performance. According to them, this includes ‘the organizational mindset and practices that facilitate and advance formal planning.’ Mental Toughness has been called ‘the mindset of the winner’ by Jim Loehr, a sport psychologist who first coined the term Mental Toughness. You might … Continue reading Why Mindset Matters for S&OP
Introduction In the last 30 years S&OP improved performance in many businesses. However, S&OP has not yet substantially delivered on its ultimate promise of enterprise wide resource management, rolling financial forecasting and strategy deployment. Whatever maturity model or consultancy support companies use, S&OP seems to get stuck. Worse, overall S&OP development and progress seems to have stalled. It sometimes seems like S&OP is stuck in … Continue reading S&OP, a vision for the future. The expert interview series #1
Mental Toughness is a personality trait which is emerging as the key to understanding how people respond to and perform under stress, pressure and challenge. Mental Toughness explains up to 25% in the variation of an individual’s performance. It is also a significant factor in individual and team health and well-being. In my new e-book, I describe how to develop 15 characteristics of the Mentally … Continue reading How Mental Toughness supports more effective 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
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
It has been a while that I wrote a blog. I’ve not read a lot of interesting articles, blogs or tweets on supply chain to get any inspiration. It seems more of the same. Usually when I go for a run or take the bicycle along the bay of Melbourne to work I think about topics to write. Lately I’ve been using that time to … Continue reading Supply Chain and S&OP left brainers
As media partner for the IE group, I didn’t need a lot more trigger to write a blog then the tag used for the October 2012 summit; ‘Advanced S&OP: Create True collaboration’. You can find my whitepaper on S&OP and collaboration here: SCT on S&OP and collaboration I’ve always been interested in collaborative processes like Collaborative Planning Forecasting & Replenishment (CPFR) and Sales and Operations … Continue reading S&OP and Collaboration
Globalization is pushing companies to plan and operate more and more across the borders of their country of origin. This will also have an impact on IBP processes. IBP stakeholders have to overcome an increasing set of social and cultural differences in their IBP meetings to handle different perspectives, disagreements and come to consensus. To handle this, IBP leaders have to be aware of cultural … Continue reading The impact of company culture on IBP part IV: Geography 1
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