Are you ready for S&OP in the Cloud?

The cloud provides a transformative opportunity for companies to connect and collaborate within their organizations and with their trading partners on the creation of executable sales and operations plans. The end-to-end demand driven value chain IS the foundation platform for your digitally enabled S&OP process.

The struggle of pivoting from supply driven to demand driven market needs has largely been due to the inability to seamlessly capture timely insights and information from the market along with supply data from suppliers and CMOs. The cloud has removed the barrier to insightful data. Companies are now able to sense and shape true demand balanced with an agile and responsive supply network.

Why now?

A recent survey identified that over 75% of companies see digital start ups as a threat, 50% don’t know where their industry will be in 3 years, and 52% experienced significant digital disruptions in the last 3 years.

Transforming your S&OP process to win in this digitally competitive environment is a necessity and will result in step change improvement in your customer facing end to end supply chain capabilities and business performance.

Adopt the Top Ten characteristics of Demand-driven S&OP in the Cloud

How do you rate against these characteristics?

1. An operating strategy with a strategy focused on business performance management with, trade-off metrics that govern policies enabled by digitalization
2. Demand driven customer focus with shared value creation across trading partners
3. Synchronized and aligned execution priorities across the value chain
4. Segmentation strategy maximizing customer demand and business performance
5. S&OP in NOW Mode with an event driven process (versus monthly) based on predefined out of tolerance conditions
6. Focus shifts from reviewing the past to closing the gaps in future plans
7. Finance involvement with a monetized S&OP plan
8. Risk analysis to proactively understand and mitigate the risk on service, revenue, profitability, and supply
9. Experimental mind set always testing existing paradigms and redefining old processes
10. Digitally enabled transformation that translates to new sources of revenue, growth and operational results.

Which roadblocks are you up against?

Process transformation is often not successful as a result of the following…

• The leadership team is not cognizant of the competitive threats. In other words, they think they are in good enough shape to make the same mistakes again!
• The perceived value of a demand driven S&OP in the cloud is not apparent
• Business and IT not aligned on value and business outcomes
• The culture of the company gets in the way
• The way people are measured conflicts with the process outcomes

Where do you start?

The transition from a traditional to cloud based digital network is not easy.

With any transformation you really need to understand your maturity level to help you determine where to start and your priorities.

A diagnostic specifically designed for S&OP that leverages the cloud will provide valuable insights for a transformation roadmap. The diagnostic results will help you determine the size and scope of work required and ensure that the business realistically focuses on the right priorities at the right time and place. The diagnostic will also identify the change management effort required to lead your company from a most typical Stage 2, 3 departmental, project oriented behaviour to an end-to-end customer driven holistic business process.

S&OP Transformation requires an integrated end to end approach. This includes reassessing your existing projects to confirm that they are aligned with the goals of the S&OP transformation and are maximizing the benefit of the Cloud.

For the first time, the barriers have been removed to enable a truly integrated end-to-end demand driven S&OP enabled by the cloud. Seize the moment and start your journey.

Author

Carol McIntosh has been advising and implementing innovative supply chain practices as a business consultant for 17 years, with an additional 17 years experience in supply chain management positions leading cross-functional teams to drive service up and inventory down. Her expertise includes concurrent planning, response management, and control towers.