Real-time insights with integrated business planning
Anyone who has ever hosted a potluck knows the hardest part is planning the event in the first place. Regardless of how much coordination takes place ahead of time, half the guests are often waylaid by last-minute conflicts and the other half bring hastily-bought potato salad instead of the dish they’d agreed to make.
Manufacturers go through similar pains when performing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). Their plans are impacted by a plethora of complicated internal and external factors, but their stakes are much higher. As the pace of business accelerates and supply chains become more complex, inefficiencies around existing planning processes are limiting manufacturers’ agility and cutting into their bottom lines. To understand the role of planning in business today, let’s take a closer look at the increasingly dynamic manufacturing landscape, why existing processes fail to keep up, and how a digitally-driven planning solution can help manufacturers overcome these challenges.
Manufacturers exist in an environment that’s increasingly complex and dynamic
Digital transformation has swept the manufacturing industry, dramatically accelerating the pace of business and creating more market volatility. Manufacturing CEOs in 2017 have sought to mitigate the effects of volatile markets by prioritizing faster times to market1, but this goal has conflicted with the growing complexity of critical aspects of manufacturing like the supply chain.
The question of how to maintain a level of supply that can support demand while keeping costs low enough to ensure profitability has always posed a challenge to manufacturers, and today, the supply chain is more complicated than ever. Factors such as decentralization across channels and geographical areas, customer demands forcing mass customization, and demand schedules becoming more compressed make it even harder to effectively manage supply and demand. While manufacturers must account for these variables, they are limited by their lack of visibility across the supply chain. For manufacturers to compete in this dynamic environment, increased visibility is an imperative—but that’s something existing planning processes simply can’t deliver.
Existing planning processes can’t keep pace in today’s dynamic landscape
Traditionally, planning has relied on time consuming processes, and the inefficiencies of these processes are becoming more of an impediment as the pace of business increases. For manufacturers to perform S&OP today, planners must first gather data from across their organization and various other enterprises involved in the supply chain. That means taking upwards of a month to consolidate data from sales, marketing, services, design and engineering, and production, all of which have their own separate data sources saved on hundreds of Excel sheets. Once data has been collected and analyzed, manufacturers are left with rigid reports built on stale data, limiting their ability to respond to changing business conditions and take advantage of opportunities.
Such a time-consuming, redundant approach makes it harder to strike the balance between service level and cost in the face of intensifying global competition and customer expectations. With no straightforward way to share data across departments, collaboration is limited if not impossible. Additionally, if a manufacturer’s business processes change, they must often rebuild their entire planning process. For manufacturers to excel in a dynamic environment, a new approach to planning is required.
Move to an intelligent, collaborative planning approach with o9 Solutions
o9 Integrated Business Planning and Operations Management for Manufacturers brings planning processes back to the speed of business by enabling manufacturers to gain insight from real-time, cross-enterprise data on a single, AI-powered platform. As the brainchild of i2’s founder Sanjiv Sidhu and key contributor Chakri Gottemukkala, o9 Solutions embodies their shared desire to deliver huge value to corporations by enabling manufacturers to gain more insight from their plans, respond with more agile planning processes, and increase visibility across enterprises.
o9 Integrated Business Planning delivers on these desires with the Enterprise Knowledge Graph, an intelligent platform that consolidates cross-organizational and cross-enterprise data before analyzing and propagating it to relevant teams. Thanks to the AI-capabilities of this platform, planners can run what-if scenarios on real-time data to drive actions around current and future business conditions and share their results with other teams.
By giving real-time data and insights to the teams that need them, manufacturers avoid the month-long data collection of traditional planning processes, drastically improving their agility and ability to respond quickly to business changes. Additionally, by connecting teams on a single platform, manufacturers have more visibility into the various departments across their organization and the other enterprises along their supply chains.
Using o9 Integrated Business Planning, manufacturers can more easily recognize emerging opportunities and potential risks, propagating them to the relevant teams to make profitable decisions. Best of all, because o9’s Integrated Business Planning solution is part of an end-to-end platform that provides comprehensive supply and demand management tools, manufacturers can easily expand their planning functionalities as business needs grow.
Conclusion:
It’s time to move beyond slow, siloed and inefficient planning processes. The o9 Integrated Business Planning solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, enables manufacturers to achieve operational excellence by providing the agile, intelligent, and collaborative approach required by today’s dynamic manufacturing landscape. To learn more about how the o9 Integrated Business Planning solution can streamline business planning processes, try out the demo at AppSource.
1 US CEO Outlook 2017: Disrupt and grow, KPMG, 2017
