This past week the mighty LA Lakers, were swept by the Dallas Mavericks in four games. The Lakers had won two straight NBA titles and were favorites of many to three-peat. Immediately after the 4th loss, which turned out to be one of the five worst losses of series deciding games in the history...
Having worked in the industry, we all know that Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is all about mega decisions being made by executives about issues such as building factories, authorizing inventory or hiring people for major projects. We also know that executive decisions are made with limited information and, especially in the world of...
The Background… Throughout a financially turbulent 2009, the Supply Chain at Electrocomponents plc needed to better integrate into the business and become more intelligent, agile and effective. Just two years into our long-term transformation journey, our key innovations have been to: Introduce formal forecasting. Embed leading Supply Chain thinking including demand planning and SIOP...
Forecasting & Planning Professionals strive to reduce error in their work. For all this effort, what is the reward? When asked what the cost of forecast error is, most discussions turn to the consequential impact of inaccurate forecasts. Consequential impacts include lost sales and profits, expedited freight, excess and obsolete inventory, and unhappy customers....
I came to work at SONY 16 years ago with lots of passion and energy. I worked across several countries and held many different responsibilities from marketing to finance to supply chain. Now, at my present vocation, being operations director at SONY, I find myself responsible for many different areas of the business. My...
The IBF’s 10th annual Supply Chain Forecasting and Planning Conference turned out to be an incredible three days at the Villas of Grand Cypress Resort in Orlando, Florida. We kicked things off with a spectacular golf outing where we got to meet new friends and enjoyed the summer like conditions. We all did our...
I suffer from a recurring dream. In that dream, I am standing in front of 300 Stock Controllers explaining how an external baseline will work alongside causal forecasting. The results of this will generate a Simple Exponential Smoothing forecast which in turn will produce auto sourced algorithms over your Bayesian plan. “Don’t worry though,”...
Last night while I was at the joint APICS/IBF/CSCMP Holiday Networking Collaborative in Boston, MA these three words came to mind, “Strength in numbers.” But before I can explain these three simple words, I should first explain all the abbreviations, right? APICS is the Association for Operations Management, IBF is the Institute of Business...
This is a good question. As I traveled down to Florida for the IBF’s Supply Chain Planning & Forecasting: Best Practices Conference w/ Advanced Practices in S&OP Forum I wasn’t sure which was harder to explain as a concept. After a few days at conference I can, with confidence, say that Sales & Operations...
Last week, I attended IBF’s Executive S&OP workshop with Tom Wallace and companies such as LG, Celegene, Integra Life Sciences, UGG Boots, and more. Some folks flew in to New Jersey from beautiful Southern California just for the S&OP education. Bless them for coming to the North East. If that doesn’t show dedication to...