{"id":1263,"date":"2011-07-22T11:12:51","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T15:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/?p=1263"},"modified":"2011-07-22T11:12:51","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T15:12:51","slug":"is-massaging-data-pushing-the-passion-out-of-our-sop-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/2011\/07\/22\/is-massaging-data-pushing-the-passion-out-of-our-sop-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Massaging Data Pushing the Passion out of our S&OP Process?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rohit<\/a>

Rohit Parangath - EMD Millipore <\/p><\/div>\n

After attending the APICS\/IBF Best of the Best S&OP conference<\/a> I came back with a sense of eagerness and ambition to implement what I had learned over the two days I had spent at the conference filled with information.<\/p>\n

The sessions that I attended included presentations from Motorola, BASF, Rolls-Royce Energy, Rubbermaid, Timberland, & OfficeMax. Topics varied from Engineer-To-Order which was a session given by a representative from Rolls-Royce Energy, to BASF\u2019s presentation on process environments to the presentation on retail environments from OfficeMax.<\/p>\n

The conference was structured to offer Level 1 and Level 2 seminars, <\/a>where Level 1 was geared towards companies that were in the process of implementing S&OP (or thinking about it) and Level 2 was aimed at companies that had a process already in place but wanted to improve. Most of the sessions that I attended were Level 2 as my company is exactly in that category.<\/p>\n

I work in the S&OP department of a bio-science company in San Diego and have held different positions in S&OP throughout my tenure there. I have held positions ranging from Demand Coordinator, to Supply Coordinator<\/a> to my current role as S&OP consultant. We have had an S&OP process in place for about 2 years now, but something<\/em> about it didn’t feel right. It has always seemed more like a data extraction and graph building<\/a> exercise than a decision making process. S&OP reviews were often seen as a burden due to the time that is needed to be invested every month to gather all of that data. For a division with close to 15,000 unique SKUs it can be quite a tedious exercise! The main point from all of the sessions that struck me was the passion<\/em> that <\/em>all of the presenters had for S&OP. All the presenters were so enthusiastic about sharing what they had learned and implemented that I actually felt that there was something lacking at my company.\u00a0 I wondered why that was the case, since we had been doing S&OP for 2 years. Why weren’t we as passionate about the process as these companies were? We even had tremendous support and executive level leadership<\/a>, which most companies lacked. It didn’t make sense.<\/p>\n

While drinking a couple beers at the Hilton Chicago’s Kitty O’Sheas Irish pub after the first day\u2019s sessions, it struck me\u2026 Data.<\/em> I realized that we spend so much time downloading, massaging and formatting the data so that it is in a presentable form that we are left with precious little time to actually analyze the data to make valid decisions based on it<\/a>. I knew I had suffered from this problem in both my Demand and Supply Coordinator roles.<\/p>\n

The next day I spoke to some of the presenters and sure enough, almost all of them had either dedicated teams of Analysts or phenomenal IT support when it came to reporting on S&OP. They spent 20% of their time gathering the data and 80% analyzing the data. It was almost the opposite in my company. I realized my first step after getting back would be to work with our IT department in order to automate our reports as much as possible. For a short term solution I decided to work with the different departments to create standard templates for reports so they don’t have to be done from scratch each time. I felt it was essential to bring back the passion that I saw at the conference<\/a> to my company and I knew that easing the S&OP workload would be the best way to do so.<\/p>\n

While the companies that presented were from varied industries, the ideology remained the same. I thought bio-science was complicated until I heard about Rolls-Royce’s take on risk mitigation in S&OP, where each order was worth millions of dollars! I learned how OfficeMax invested a lot of time in working with their suppliers to get them involved in the S&OP process. I also loved Newell Rubbermaid’s concept of S&OP entities.<\/p>\n

Some other tips and ideas that I took from the conference and\u00a0 plan to implement are listed below
\n
\nSimplify the Cs.<\/strong>
\nLet ERP control your Cs. Most of us have multi-million dollar ERP suites. The least it can do is manage your C materials with minimal input. Stop over analyzing C materials and try your best to automate all operational procurement and production processes<\/a>. Use Safety stock, re-order point planning or min-max levels in order to plan for low sellers with minimal forecasts.
\n
\nExtend<\/strong>
\nIn order to be successful you need to extend S&OP beyond the organization. Identify key customers and suppliers to work with and then build and value your relationships with them.
\n
\nShare<\/strong>
\nUsually only a few lower management level employees are involved in the S&OP process. Spread responsibilities around to get more employee involvement. S&OP is not an elite club<\/a>, it becomes much more efficient when you build an S&OP knowledge base with key people across your different sites. Increase conversations about the S&OP process<\/a> to bounce ideas off each other. Do not underestimate the value of visibility. Transparency is worth it’s weight in diamonds.<\/p>\n

This was my first APICS<\/a>\/IBF conference <\/a>and I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I definitely did not expect the lessons that I took home\u00a0 to be as helpful as it was. I’ll be there next time as well!<\/p>\n

Thanks!
\n
\nRohit Parangath, CPIM<\/strong>
\nS&OP and Integrated Planning Processes Consultant
\nEMD Millipore<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After attending the APICS\/IBF Best of the Best S&OP conference I came back with a sense of eagerness and ambition to implement what I had learned over the two days I had spent at the conference filled with information. The sessions that I attended included presentations from Motorola, BASF, Rolls-Royce Energy, Rubbermaid, Timberland, & OfficeMax. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":891,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[82,60,61,62,41,64,65,66,34,67,39,68,69,70,35,42,43,44,36,48,81,37,73,74,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-1263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-forecasting-and-planning","7":"tag-apics","8":"tag-best-practices","9":"tag-business-forecasting","10":"tag-collaborative-forecasting","11":"tag-data-cleansing","12":"tag-demand-forecast","13":"tag-demand-forecasting","14":"tag-demand-management","15":"tag-demand-planning","16":"tag-demand-planning-and-forecasting-conference","17":"tag-economic-forecasting","18":"tag-executive-sop","19":"tag-forecast-accuracy","20":"tag-forecast-error","21":"tag-forecasting","22":"tag-forecasting-metrics","23":"tag-forecasting-models","24":"tag-forecasting-system","25":"tag-ibf","26":"tag-institute-of-business-forecasting-and-planning","27":"tag-inventory-management","28":"tag-sop","29":"tag-sales-operations-planning","30":"tag-sales-forecasting","31":"tag-supply-chain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/891"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}