{"id":94,"date":"2009-05-30T12:50:06","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T19:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/?p=94"},"modified":"2009-05-30T12:50:06","modified_gmt":"2009-05-30T19:50:06","slug":"the-scoop-on-sop-one-companys-recession-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/2009\/05\/30\/the-scoop-on-sop-one-companys-recession-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Scoop on S&OP: One Company's Recession Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"tom-wallace\"

Tom Wallace<\/p><\/div>\n

This is my first posting to the IBF\u2019s new blog, and I\u2019d like to express my thanks, first of all, to you, the readers and also to Anish Jain of the IBF who invited me in.<\/p>\n

Okay, let\u2019s get to work. Are you ready for a horror story? It ranks right up there with \u201cNight of the Living Dead,\u201d \u201cCreature from the Black Lagoon,\u201d and \u201cAliens II.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s about dealing with these horrible, horrifying economic times we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I was talking with Ross Bushman, the COO\/President of Cast-Fab Technologies, a large and very successful foundry. Until recently their largest market was wind power \u2013 the equipment used to generate electrical power from wind \u2013 but as with so many other things the recession and financial meltdown got in the way.<\/p>\n

Ross explained to me that 1) developing a wind farm is a very expensive proposition 2) the developers of wind farms rarely have enough internal capital to fund these projects themselves and 3) they therefore turn to external funders such as banks, investment firms, insurance companies and so forth.<\/p>\n

Well, Ross said that things started to go south in the 3rd quarter of 2008. Their three largest wind farm customers were funded by Lehman Brothers (bankruptcy), Wachovia Bank (bought by Europeans), and AIG (and we all know what happened to them). Thus the funding went away. The wind farm developers told Cast-Fab to stop producing their orders.<\/p>\n

The result: Cast-Fab\u2019s wind power business went away overnight. The orders were cancelled. Ross told me how he and his team used their Executive S&OP process to manage the decline, using what some call the \u201cMini-S&OP Cycle\u201d to quickly track demand shifts and their impact on workload.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what Ross said:<\/p>\n

“I am convinced that we kept more people employed for a longer time due to our S&OP process and our ability to instantly see how new forecasts affected the shop load.\u00a0 Being pro-active within our workforce reductions helped everyone \u2013 even though it was tough for people to see at the time.\u00a0\u00a0 Too often companies wait until they see last month’s numbers before making decisions. S&OP enables us \u2013 and almost \u201cforces\u201d us \u2013 to be pro-active.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another piece of good news: the business will come back. And when it starts to kick back in,\u00a0 you can be sure that Cast-Fab will use their S&OP process to help them proactively plan their production rate increases, the timing of their recalls and new hires, and thus be ready to meet the demand.<\/p>\n

The moral of the story: S&OP can be a big help both in the downside part of a recession and also in the recovery.<\/p>\n

LEARN HOW THEY DID IT<\/p>\n

I did a webinar recently and covered the Cast-Fab story in more detail. To see it, go to here<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to learn how they did it from the \u201chorse\u2019s mouth\u201d and get the complete story? Ross Bushman, Cast-Fab\u2019s COO, will be a keynote speaker at the S&OP Best of the Best Conference in Chicago on June 18-19, co-sponsored by IBF and APICS. He\u2019ll be joined by over a dozen other experts in how to use Executive S&OP to manage a business more effectively. For details, you can check into
\nwww.ibf.org\/apicsibf.cfm<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks for listening,<\/p>\n

Tom
\nwww.tfwallace.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my first posting to the IBF\u2019s new blog, and I\u2019d like to express my thanks, first of all, to you, the readers and also to Anish Jain of the IBF who invited me in. Okay, let\u2019s get to work. Are you ready for a horror story? It ranks right up there with \u201cNight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[34,35,36,37],"class_list":{"0":"post-94","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-forecasting-and-planning","7":"tag-demand-planning","8":"tag-forecasting","9":"tag-ibf","10":"tag-sop"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94"}],"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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}