Sales and Operations Plans are as good as the processes that are in place to manage them. There is extreme complexity and volatility built in managing a Plan based on a number of factors, including supply & demand match, forecast, sales, deliveries, shipments, inventory optimization, transportation and collaboration. Do we have the right tools to manage the complex processes? What we do if we cannot follow the plan? Do we have processes to remedy the issues? New tools are available to manage the plan. P-D-C-A is one concept that can help create and manage S&OP to a new level of excellence.

Delivering increased efficiency and productivity are often key focus areas for sales and operations organizations, but successfully driving these two metrics may cause individuals to focus overly on small changes to immediate operations in lieu of larger-scale improvements. This presentation will highlight methods to create space for innovation in sales and operations teams. It will examine using organizational structure, tool development, and goal-setting as ways to encourage creativity and innovation and provide examples from Google’s operations.

As the VP of Production, Special Operations for The Fox Broadcasting Company’s marketing department, my job is mostly a balancing act between lead-in prep and on-set flexibility. With each project requiring its own customized operational approach based on creative, turnaround, and distribution, the key to success becomes the ability to pre-produce each project with the knowledge that both the creative, and hence the approach, may change at the very last minute thanks to often unexpected and/or unavoidable variables. This need for on-the-spot decision-making without compromising the marketing integrity of the creative and keeping to budgetary limits makes my job unpredictable and exhilarating.

Uncertainty in the market demand represents a big challenge for sales and operations planning. This holds especially true for the industries with long production cycle times and thus, long reaction times to changing customer demand. In this keynote, S&OP in uncertain environment is discussed in the context of forecasting, investment and capacity planning and cost flexibility. Practical examples from the semiconductor industry illustrate the impact of market uncertainty to S&OP and provide a glimpse of how to deal with it. The findings from the semiconductor industry will be generalized and can be applied to other industries.

With traditional S&OP, enterprises leverage the basics of collaboration through the monthly alignment of demand and supply plans into a “one number plan” to drive enterprise execution. While this can be an effective planning method, it does not provide the framework for profit-focused, agile planning and execution that businesses must adopt to counter variability and uncertainty to achieve enterprise goals in today’s rapidly changing business environment. This session will explore how businesses can take S&OP to a higher maturity level that enables the creation of demand-driven profitable plans and the execution of tactical levers required to align plans with changing business conditions that achieve today’s enterprise goals – Profitability and Agility.

Your company has spent 6 years trying to tie the whole forecasting process together and has spent millions on software, consultants, etc., Still, there are huge disconnects between Sales, Finance, Product Management, and Operations. Your VP/GM comes up to you and asks you, “I need this whole thing reinvented in ONE WEEK.” What do you do? David Choe will share in tactical details how he crafts a breakthrough kaizen event to bring an entire organization together and turnaround confusing processes.

The conventional wisdom in hardware, software, and other industries is that you can’t make money selling to small business. But that wisdom is confounded every day by companies like Dell, Intuit, and salesforce.com. Rather than relying on traditional cold-calling and pavement-pounding, the secret to success with SMB is tightly integrated marketing and sales activities and teams, clean hand-offs at every stage, and fast closing. This presentation by the first Senior Vice President of Global Marketing for salesforce.com will provide case studies of what works and what doesn’t, and how you can turn small business into your most reliable market.

Accurately predicting revenue and operating performance is a daunting challenge facing many enterprises. Despite their awareness of the significant adverse impact that missed forecasts and plans, the most common solution for budgeting and planning is still the disconnected spreadsheet. The resulting long budget cycles and forecasting inaccuracies prevent responsiveness to change, causing companies to miss business opportunities while wasting money and resources on deteriorating business segments.

Traditional Integrated Business Planning is a common practice in High Tech. Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain and Sales collaborate to build a plan. What’s in the plan, how fast the plan and gaps are managed, what technology is used to automate, and how skilled is the team are levels of maturity. Some do it well, some not so well. It’s been a common practice for quite some time. What’s changed a lot is on the outside of IBP. Customers have greater access information in the purchase process. Companies are prioritizing cash flow vs profitability before product decisions. Mobility is not only changing the customer’s practice, but also the supply chain collaboration practice. I will highlight my recent work with a Silicon Valley high tech company that believes understanding external behaviors will drive a better Plan.

Companies today face many challenges in trying to determine the demand from their customers and how to align their supply chain to best meet this demand. Many companies have implemented an S&OP process where Product Management, Sales, Supply Chain and Finance participate in the process to gain better insights, but the results have been mixed. A true collaborative process with insights into the drivers of the forecast and the resulting impact on the supply chain is lacking due to variety of strategic, process, organizational, technology and data limitations. An S&OP Synchronization (Synch) approach effectively defines and integrates processes and roles & responsibilities to develop an operating plan that captures insights from multiple stakeholders. For example, Sales insights into accounts and opportunities, Product Management insights into the market and product plans. By implementing an S&OP Synch approach companies can proactively resolve issues, make strategic business decisions and greatly increase the performance of their supply chain.

- Does This Still Rely On Traditional Supply Chain Processes?

- What Does It Take To Get & Stay There?

- What Is The Best Way To Overcome High-Tech Lifecycle Issues?

- What Is The Reason For The Large Disconnect Of S&OP Within High-Tech Organizations?

In this presentation, Lora will present an overview of factors for S&OP success and organizational readiness. The discussion will include lessons learned, pitfalls and insights from Leaders. The session will end with recommendations to move to higher levels of maturity. In this session, you will learn: 10 Factors that matter, Issues that can derail progress, Recommendations to move forward.

For some time, there has been a movement to drive the entire organization from a single operating number, usually the budget. In theory that is a good thing, as long as you have the right number. The budget is what the company wants or wishes to happen; very seldom is it what is going to happen. For that matter, so is the sales forecast. Learn how range planning can reduce risks and breed a more profitable operation by working on the premise that being ‘roughly right’ is far better than being ‘precisely wrong’.

The challenges of sales and operational planning are magnified in a startup environment. Typically a high tech startup is comprised of researchers who have brilliant ideas, but who know nothing about what it takes to move a company towards commercialization, let alone actually realize it. Often met with resistance it is operations job to simultaneously change the culture (often done covertly) while building the infrastructure and discipline necessary to make and deliver quality products. You must scale with zero sales history, over build; under build both have measureable consequences. Startups are challenging, but done well the rewards are tremendous.

Learn how to evaluate the maturity of your current S&OP process and identify the key actions, issues and timing necessary to move to the next level. Participate in an interactive discussion on best practices for S&OP in the High Tech Industry, led by SAP’s Industry Business Consulting Practice, leveraging their experiences with customers. Learn how SAP is utilizing the power of SAP HANA to empower companies and their supply networks to become more demand-driven, enabling them to rapidly translate dynamic fluctuations in customer demand into actionable, operational plans for logistics, manufacturing and procurement.

Leadership companies are leveraging sustainability initiatives to achieve profound savings and untapped value across the enterprise. Learn why organizations are examining their use and production of energy, carbon, water, materials, and waste; resource-focused sustainability strategies companies are adopting to create value; and the benefits of a resource-focused approach, including insulation against commodity price shock and collaboration between customers, suppliers, and your organization.

3 Critical Factors will drive your organization's S&OP to deliver even more value. Extending S&OP – bringing your Supply Chain partners into the game Resolving Visibility Issues using new technologies such as the "cloud" Focusing on cross-enterprise process and performance.

Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is a term used to describe next generation Sales And Operations Planning (S&OP) processes. But there are different views about what constitutes “full integration”. This session will present an approach that leverages IBP technology to “fully integrate” S&OP, budgeting, rolling forecasts, capi-tal / investment planning, cash flow forecasting and activity-based profit planning, into a single rolling forecast process. The result: a cross functional process that drives sustainable cost reduction and profitable growth, enabled by the ability to manage risks and tradeoffs, across outlying scenarios. Case studies will also be used to show how IBP capabilities helped global organizations realize $100 to $500 million in value.