Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)
In a continuing effort to improve business performance,
discrete manufacturing companies regularly manage
detailed unit-driven production plans, order-based sales
forecasts, and operational finances and tie all this
information together into a sales & operations plan.
Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is the set of
business processes and supporting technologies that
enable an enterprise to effectively respond to demand
and supply variability with timely decisions regarding
the right supply, demand, and manufactured product mix.
Sales & Revenue Forecasting Challenges
The most important business challenges facing
manufacturers today is how to proactively manage gross
margin performance in support of profitability. In order
to do this, companies must focus on:
- Optimizing demand planning cycles and productivity
- Automating and enabling effective communication
between all functional operational silos
- Obtaining detailed, real-time visibility into your
extended manufacturing operations
- Monitoring and continually optimizing plans to drive
profitability
The problem is that actively managing gross margin
means gaining a cross-company insight into the real-time
operating processes of different departments. This is
not easy— after years of effort and millions of dollars
invested in rigid enterprise applications, most
manufacturing companies have not accomplished this
objective. Because of this, gross margin tends to be
evaluated using manual, spreadsheet-based processes with
historical data and at an aggregate operating level.
This type of process does not provide clear insight into
what detailed operational improvements can be made and
what their impact will be on the company’s gross margin
and profit picture.
Effective Business Process Automation
The key to effective business process automation for
S&OP at an account and product level of detail would be
to find a way to mitigate the limitations of today’s
spreadsheets. This means letting users still operate
with their current spreadsheet processes, but now have
them enabled with the collaborative data management
capabilities offered by today’s enterprise class
systems.
With this capability, rather than expending company
resources on manually collecting, rolling up, and
assessing the numbers in the first place, management
could instead focus on the field and operating
information that is used to develop the numbers. They
could even add their own assessments to the information
and conduct what-if analysis to determine impact of
changes on profitability. With this deeper insight and
capability, companies could spend more time making
effective management decisions and driving their
business to greater profitability.
The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven S&OP Platform
Manufacturers are increasingly looking to BPA to
increase operational efficiency throughout the
organization— including spreadsheet-based processes.
Boardwalktech has solved the collaborative spreadsheet
problem and mitigated the inherent problems with
isolated spreadsheet processes. Using the Boardwalk
Collaborative Platform (BCP), manufacturers can apply
BPA to existing spreadsheet-based processes providing
the time critical visibility into the detailed
operational data they desire.
- Access to detailed planning data: Detailed
unit-driven production plans means companies are working
with granular planning information including multiple
products SKUs, prices, channels, and geographies across
divisions and business units. There’s also continuously
evolving business rules for discounts, pricing,
availability, and costing information. All this
information is easily managed today with spreadsheets
since creating another column to capture a business
parameter or adjusting a formula or a selection option
in a spreadsheet-based model is a snap—not so with a
traditional enterprise application. BCP makes all this
existing detailed planning information collaborative and
readily available to all process participants.
- Spreadsheet-based, ad-hoc collaboration &
consolidation: Multiple users can work on the same
spreadsheet-based information at the same time even in
isolation. When ready, users simply submit their changes
to BCP, which can be data, formula or even structural
changes like new rows & columns. BCP then distributes
the updates automatically to other collaborative users
and inter-dependent processes. These changes “refresh”
rather than replace process information as updates are
made which makes understanding what’s changed very easy.
All updates, whether from a user or other application,
are also automatically consolidated across multiple
process hierarchies giving you a rolled up view of all
your operating data with a click of the mouse. This
helps you save time and reduce errors by eliminating the
traditional “collaborative” spreadsheet process of “cut
& paste, update, save-as, email, and repeat.”
- Automation of manual S&OP processes: Most enterprise
business process applications are designed to replace
the spreadsheets used today by process experts who have
evolved & developed their spreadsheet-based process
models using the power and flexibility of Excel. With
these powerful, yet manual processes, companies end up
working with multiple versions of spreadsheets which are
often linked together in static “shared drive” data
silos. This means wading through multiple versions of
multiple files to understand what’s changed and why and
then manually moving to the next process step. By using
BCP to automate and connect manual spreadsheet-based
S&OP processes, management can reduce the amount of time
required to perform a process from hours to minutes and
spend more time performing the “what-if” analysis needed
to improve operating profit.
- Real-time process information visibility: By
eliminating “functional silos,” enabling collaboration,
and automating existing spreadsheet-based manual
processes using BCP, all participants can work with
real-time spreadsheet-based information. This means that
changes made to their part of the sales & operations
plan reflect the latest information from all other
participants which makes the whole S&OP process more
effective.
- Unprecedented executive insight using existing
tools: Most executive business process “systems” are
really just reports that give executives little to no
ability to work with the information. With BCP,
management can not only see what’s changing and why, but
can also add their own assessment to the information and
conduct what-if analysis to determine the impact of any
changes on profitability. All this, using a familiar &
powerful business process modeling environment they are
already familiar and comfortable with—the spreadsheet.
- Enterprise-quality, secure data management & control
for spreadsheet-based processes: BCP lets you set up a
single, secure, shared source of key corporate data from
existing spreadsheet-based processes that can now be
made available across the extended enterprise,
on-demand. All critical spreadsheet data managed with
BCP can be put under role-appropriate, cell-level access
control so only the right people can work with the right
data. This insures that you always have reliable data to
enable effective decision making. In addition, all
changes to all cells (data, business logic, and
structure) are continuously versioned and tracked with
an audit trail enabling data comparisons and analysis at
any point in time. BCP’s powerful data management means
you can now have complete enterprise-quality insight
into your spreadsheet-based processes including all
participants, activities, and systems.
The BCP SOP solution means all participants in the process can now be easily aligned using a tool they are already familiar with-- the spreadsheet. Since BCP"s Enterprise 2.0 technology uses the common desktop spreadsheet as its "web form" while retaining the spreadsheet's powerful business process modeling and flexibility capabilities, companies now have access to a solutoin which can reach across the entire extended enterprise
Benefits of using BCP for S&OP
- Eliminating email for collaboration, cut & paste for consolidation, and “save-as” for versioning means the forecasting cycle can be shifted from a once a month, tedious process to an “on-demand” sharing of forecast data as it changes.
- Individual sales reps can continue to use Excel in isolation on their desktop which means adoption is high, training is easy, and time taken away from selling is minimized.
It's also a lot easier for reps and outside partners to
update multiple forecast line items using a tabular
spreadsheet environment rather than a web form which
often forces users to update one record at a time.
- Understanding what changes have occurred in an opportunity over its entire lifetime enables a better analysis of the development of individual opportunities, as well as the sales pipeline as a whole, and helps to calibrate expectations for future sales performance.
- Since spreadsheets are the common platform between different operating groups, all stakeholders in the sales and revenue forecasting process can use the same shared set of data, but only update their portion of the data. This means everyone stays aligned on expectations and company performance improves.
- Implement in weeks, not months. Existing
spreadsheets can be used without modification, so you
can continue using the familiar Excel interface for data
entry, modification, analysis & reporting. Users simply
define what regions of their spreadsheet data they want
to share, whom they want to share with, and how the
consolidation of data should take place. BCP does the
rest—automatically. This means BCP can be deployed in
days, not months as with traditional enterprise point
solutions
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