Another response to a Beetfusion blog on how to make S&OP happen and why so hard

beetfusion.com/forum/what-value-sop#comment-340

Back in my days at Booz Allen we had a model for IT Strategy that really made sense and I think it still does

It used a pyramid as a metaphor and the base of the pyramid were utility systems you had to have but really just needed to run the most cost effective way. As you reach the top of the pyramid are the strategy based systems that generate competitive advantage, differentiate your business.   Accounting is essentially a “utility” have to have but by no means creates advantage.

S&OP linked to your demand generation systems to me are in essence the most sustainable forms of competitive advantage.   Unfortunatly, since deploying in 90% of business is taking on the establishment holding on to accounting / ERP dug in IT’ers, accountants and ERP salesmen it is hard work and delicate to reach breakthrough.   Have done it many times so speak with a bit of experience and could list all sorts of interesting ways and events that have to happen to break through.

Better, we educate and / or use unique technologies the break the “fraud” of ERP.    If you start to reach even a small percentage of the 90% who don’t know what they don’t know you do alot of good, create alot of value and help many business create competitive advantage

This is why we have taken on several indirect initiatives over past few years to help make this break through

1. invented and patented a real time S&OP (Order Comitment) that is easy for average employee an any firm to use to commit the incremental order.. thus improve ROA.

2.  We also make our S&OP solutions completely non invasive, can work with any systems of any type,  Do not have “new” expensive BS user interfaces we let planners and all in an enterprise use Exel as user interface.  Even use asynchonousl so can still do their own offline analysis… even send analysis to S&OP team to cleanup and include in repository as a template that can be checked out by others and sync’ed with supply chain repository and S&OP cleansed data etc.

3. We have done a considerable amount of philinthropic efforts with State of Texas Governors office, US manufacturing assistance center and US Department of Commerce on using these supply chain strategies and enablers to create jobs… One example we like very much is leverage of postponed manfufacturing.    Our efforts probably generate over a half billion in governemt funding … but once politicians got the money they diverted it to other efforts.  Very very disapointing but is reality

4. We even built a re-manufacturing business using these concepts from the ground up to have a show case to show how it can be done very profitably and thus “eat our own dogfood” This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.