Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Demand Forecasting,
Inventory Optimization, and
Price Elasticity
Supply chain planning relies heavily on science and algorithms for better demand forecasting and inventory management. This includes forecasting independent customer demand, which changes with customer preferences. It also includes dependent demand that aggregates demand streams at a stocking point upstream to other echelons of the supply chain.
Let’s look at how science and machine learning in Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is streamlining demand forecasting, inventory optimization and price elasticity to improve long-/short-term planning for complex distribution supply chains.
Why is the Distribution Supply Chain So Complex?
Many factors are contributing to increasing complexity in these forecasts, including outbound customer demand volatility, managing multiple suppliers with long lead times (especially overseas), constrained transportation capacity, and increasing inbound supply line volatility.
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Large Assortments
Distributors face even greater complexity in managing their supply chains. Large assortments to serve existing customers has become key to differentiation, but introduces an ever larger assortment with intermittent, lumpy and sparse demand in the “long tail.”
Fulfillment Standards
Multiple distribution centers serving a demanding customer base with increased expectations of rapid and reliable fulfillment introduces further complexity to the multiple echelons of inventory. Finally, increasing sales on mobile, ecommerce, and other direct channels is growing and competing with traditional channels for inventory and adds to inventory volatility across channels and echelons.
Sophisticated Science and Analytics
One solution to address this complexity is advanced analytics that can handle large data sets down to transaction-level details. Demand classification is key to identifying the type of demand for each product on each channel to apply the best forecasting techniques.
Advanced seasonality techniques are critical for identifying recurring seasonal trends, de-seasonalizing demand, and determining baseline demand. This supports flagging peaks in demand above baseline that can be associated with events like promotional activities, non-recurring natural incidents, and other factors driving demand forecast anomalies.
Machine Learning Tools for Inventory Optimization
Sophisticated science also improves inventory optimization. Machine learning is becoming a more significant addition to the demand forecasting toolkit, and is being widely used to optimize inventory forecasting accuracy.
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Price Elasticity and Price Optimization
A crucial piece of the supply chain planning puzzle is price optimization. Since distributors face increasing transparency and competition, there is growing price sensitivity across channels and customer segments. Price elasticity must use similar techniques to demand forecasting in de-seasonalizing demand to determine baseline and measure response to price changes.
A proven practice for using elasticity of demand to measure willingness-to-pay is to measure price sensitivity for products sold on all channels and locations down to the customer level.
Another critical practice is using product attributes to infer price elasticity deeper into the assortment using Bayesian inference and other techniques. Remember analyzing large data sets down to the transaction level? Invoice-level data and analysis is part of this approach.
“INFORMATION IS THE OIL OF THE 21ST CENTURY, AND ANALYTICS IS THE COMBUSTION ENGINE.”
Long- and Short-Term Supply Chain Planning
Short Term: Sales & Operations Execution (S&OE)
Demand forecasting, Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO), and Price Optimization science certainly complement each other in tactical, shorter term (12-18 month) supply chain planning. I refer to the concept of short-term SCP + Pricing = Demand Shaping as “Sales & Operations Execution (S&OE)”. But what about using these advanced techniques in longer-term S&OP?
The benefits of effective S&OP are compelling - lower operating costs, reduced inventory requirements, and top-line growth, and top-performing S&OP companies are realizing these benefits and in the process gaining competitive advantage.
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Almost 70% of Respondents Have Adopted Formal S&OP View Slideshow
The Hackett Group Resources
The Hackett Group’s “The CPO Agenda: Procurement’s Key Issues in 2013” Research Report
Of all the Hackett Key Issues Studies conducted in the last five years, the 2013 edition shows the greatest year over- last change in priorities for both performance and capability-related issues.
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Pricing: Distributors’ most powerful value-creation lever
September 16, 2019 | Article
By Alex Abdelnour and Walter Baker
Pricing: Distributors’ most powerful value-creation lever
With new digital capabilities, distributors are finding that pricing can do more than traditional margin-expansion methods to create new value.
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Pricing is undergoing a revolution fueled by big data, advanced analytics tools, and powerful digital capabilities. Distribution businesses are well positioned to reap the benefits of this revolution, given the high volume of transactions they support and the breadth and complexity of both their product and customer portfolios. The pricing capability is critically important in a business where margins tend to be razor thin; no other lever can do more to raise earnings. But mind-sets haven’t caught up. Many industry leaders still relegate pricing to a “deal desk” rather than making it the centerpiece of commercial excellence.
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Distributors who embark on end-to-end pricing transformations can expand earnings by up to 50 percent with modest or negligible impact on volume. Their sales forces will be far more efficient and effective as they tailor pricing to each customer and situation, and they will provide accurate quotes more quickly, thereby improving the customer experience. Armed with additional capital, some companies will invest more in growth and differentiation. By offering new value-added services, these leaders can gain competitive advantage and build market share.
For many distributors, the traditional playbook of margin expansion has run its course
For years, distributors have pursued greater scale to expand margins by a few percentage points and return on sales in mergers that have significant overlap by up to 3 to 4 percent. Since the bottom of the Great Recession, nearly 30 percent of publicly traded distributors have acquired at least one other distributor (up from 20 percent in the decade before the recession), and revenue increases from the average acquisition today are roughly 35 percent larger.
In this industry-wide scramble for scale, attractive targets have become scarcer and thus more expensive, reducing returns on investment. Most industry leaders realize that once they have become the number-one or number-two player in a market, additional acquisitions can yield diminishing returns; indeed, many customers continue to use secondary suppliers to limit the risk of supply-chain disruption and sometimes to keep their primary suppliers honest. In addition, most acquirers face complex challenges as they try to merge far-flung sales organizations that make daily pricing decisions on hundreds of thousands of SKUs for thousands of customers and, at the same time, try to marry disparate IT systems, each with a patchwork of homegrown tools and expensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.
But even as building scale is delivering less value, raising margins through pricing is so complex that many big distributors have shied away from it. Instead, they allow sales teams to rely on their own knowledge and experience, assuming that each customer is unique and therefore no algorithm or dynamic pricing tool can offer useful insights. Mergers contribute to the problem when a focus on the challenges of integration causes managers to underinvest in data integration and analytical capabilities to optimize pricing across product catalogs, geographies, and organizational fiefdoms. Many focus on back-end margins—for example, maximizing supplier rebates and special pricing to expand margins—not realizing that gains in purchasing and procurement may be given away to customers due to a lack of pricing capabilities.
Pricing is distributors’ most powerful value-creation lever
In contrast to past reliance on growth through M&A, the outperformers in the years ahead will be the distributors that see price optimization as the foundation of commercial excellence—speeding pricing approvals and helping salespeople make not just more and bigger deals but more profitable deals. For a distributor, pricing is by far the most powerful lever for improving overall margins and increasing profits. A 1 percent price increase across the product portfolio has more impact on bottom-line margins (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or EBITDA) than a 1 percent uplift in volume or a 1 percent reduction in procurement cost or in selling, general, and administrative expense (SG&A).
Looking across our database of 130 global and publicly traded distributors, we estimate that a 1 percent price increase would yield 22 percent increase in EBITDA margins (Exhibit 1), and a 25 percent uplift in stock price. Moreover, pricing has a disproportionate impact on a distributor’s enterprise value, with an increase of 20 percent for a 1 percent increase in price.
Exhibit 1
Pricing is the most powerful lever for distributors.
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Achieving similar impact using other levers requires improvements of a larger order of magnitude. For example, an average distributor in 2018 would have to grow volume by 5.9 percent while holding operating expenses flat to achieve the same impact as a 1 percent price increase—no small feat, especially in mature markets where competition is fierce and growth often comes at the expense of profitability. That same distributor would have to reduce fixed costs by 7.5 percent or buy 22 percent of its own size (assuming similar P&L structure) to deliver an equivalent uplift in EBITDA. The only other lever with the same power as pricing is procurement, where similar results would require an aggregated cost reduction of nearly 1.2 percent across specialty and commodity products.
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Optimizing price requires overcoming misconceptions
Even experienced salespeople may believe that raising prices means losing deals, especially when competitors offer similar products. They may argue for aggressive price cuts to keep large customers happy (and reach their own volume targets). Our qualitative and quantitative research reveals that the truth is more nuanced. A lack of product availability, poor service, and damaged customer relationships can scuttle more deals than high prices, for example, and low prices rarely win deals.
Our survey of more than 200 distribution customers across sectors indicates that pricing ranks sixth overall in what customers look for in a distributor (Exhibit 2). Price is the most important factor in winning deals on the key value items (KVIs) that represent the top 20 percent of products, which represent roughly 80 percent of an individual customer’s purchases. But most customers are far less price sensitive on the many other items in their shopping baskets. This is where distributors have the biggest opportunities to raise margins.
Exhibit 2
Customers rank pricing sixth in importance.
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Sophisticated sales teams can increase their win rates with a deeper understanding of each customer’s willingness to pay for KVIs and the other value they provide, such as one-stop shopping across categories, convenient and prompt delivery, a breadth of brands and models, financial facilitation for small and medium-size businesses, flexible return policies, and, of course, product expertise.
Salespeople hungry to make deals may continually ask for price reductions, but cutting prices in a low-margin environment risks eroding margins without enough volume uplift to make up the difference. For a distributor with gross margins of 18 percent, for example, the volume uplift required to break even is roughly 6 percent for a 1 percent price cut. Continuously lowering prices is a race to zero margin. In the long run, it makes more sense to build pricing strategies on each customer’s willingness to pay and a keen understanding of the nonprice factors that the customer values most.
In distribution, of course, the number of customers and array of SKUs are too large for any human sales rep to know exactly how much to charge in each situation. Instead, most focus on a handful of high-turn products they know well, supplemented by a shorthand approach to the remaining thousands of items, such as using the same markup, margin, or discount percentages across all other products. This can mean overpricing some items (which can shake the trust of the customer) and underpricing other items (resulting in missed margin opportunities).
The distributors who outperform are those whose sales reps focus less on pricing thousands of items and more on selling, growing share of wallet, and delivering on the distributor’s unique value propositions. Many of these winners have a pricing organization, digital tools, and analytical benchmarks to give sales reps the market and customer intelligence they need to drive volume and margins.
These distributors don’t raise prices across the board. Instead, they look for pockets of strategic pricing opportunities and continuously improve their approaches and systems. For instance, in a business with a large transportation-cost component, sales reps have clear incentives to include the cost of freight at the transaction level to avoid underpricing items with a higher shipping cost. Leading distributors drive changes in measurement, incentives, and behaviors to improve price quality and achieve customer loyalty and other desired business outcomes.
Leaders also keep pace with their customers’ rising procurement capabilities. Large companies have doubled their investments in procurement in just the past six years, giving their procurement teams new price-comparison tools, clean-sheeting techniques, and best practices in category management. Most companies would rather cut their own costs or persuade suppliers to drop theirs than ask customers to pay higher prices.
What really matters in B2B dynamic pricing
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Best-in-class distributors use pricing to create value
A handful of distributors have been pioneers in adopting pricing as a discipline and have invested in building pricing organizations with a mandate to deliver year-over-year margin improvement. They have then embarked on journeys to build pricing discipline and exception routines in the sales organization and adopt analytics and other tools to capture value.
Based on our experience standing up pricing organizations and supporting several distributors on their pricing journeys, we have laid out five key elements of building a profit-generating pricing organization that creates substantial, steady uplifts in margins, even during challenging economic times:
Build a dedicated pricing organization with organizational clout. Distributors should consider standing up a pricing and margin-management organization to improve pricing processes and discipline. Using best practices, it can drive more consistent approaches to pricing routines and margin management across the organization, provide an end-to-end view of how pricing affects customers, and use new tools and technologies to help the sales organization capture value.
For example, the sales organization of a leading food-service distributor had autonomy over pricing but limited sophistication. The company took a multiyear journey to build a centralized pricing organization with local support in branches. Reporting to the chief operating officer, the pricing organization had a mandate to drive yearly margin expansion, develop long-term pricing strategy, and fend off digital threats. The pricing organization started small, launching quick-win initiatives across pilot locations and creating enough excitement to develop a pull from various branch managers rather than a push from the ivory tower. Several years in, the pricing organization is a profit generator with strong credibility in the sales organization, consistently delivering margin improvements of 50 to 100 basis points.
Embed best-in-class processes in the sales organization. Pricing in many sales teams is often an art rather than a science and lacks the structure, thoroughness, or oversight needed for consistent profit maximization. The winners clearly define pricing processes, including steps, owners, inputs, and outputs.
For example, an electrical distributor has implemented a rigorous performance-management routine with a layered escalation process to manage and control runaway exceptions more effectively. A pricing “war room” evaluates requests for exceptions, tracking their frequency and depth, analyzing deal economics, and providing sales reps with real-time guidance on prevailing prices. Adherence to pricing rules, policies, and targets is monitored and used for coaching at various levels of the organization, including sales reps, sales managers, branch managers, regional managers, and senior leadership.
Embrace advanced analytics and the digital revolution. As noted, it’s unrealistic to expect sales reps to get the best price in every transaction. Today, however, large distributors can run advanced analytics using their treasure troves of internal data enriched with readily available external data to identify pricing opportunities and arm sales reps with benchmarks and digital tools to make better pricing decisions.
A high-tech distributor with hundreds of thousands of SKUs and thousands of customers invested in a dynamic deal-scoring solution to group customers and products in segments. It provides sales reps with pricing recommendations for each order, tailored to the order’s size, location, customer characteristics, end market, and suppliers. This has minimized human error and pricing variability, improving margins significantly. The dynamic deal-scoring algorithm is part of an easy-to-use tool that sales reps employ to get product information, price each product, and obtain real-time benchmarks showing how their pricing compares with similar transactions by colleagues, which builds their confidence in their ability to tailor prices to deal characteristics.
Align sales incentives with margin expansion. Sales-rep compensation has traditionally been tied to volume rather than margins, which sometimes leads to revenue growth at the expense of profit. Indeed, since the Great Recession, distributors have grown revenue by about 7.5 percent per year, on average, while margins remained low and well below those before the recession (Exhibit 3). Best-in-class sales organizations are increasingly tying compensation to both revenue and margin growth.
Exhibit 3
Margins have sputtered despite revenue growth.
We strive to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to our website. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you. Please email us at: McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.comAn electronics distributor, facing significant margin erosion despite solid sales growth, realized that its thousands of sales reps, who were compensated solely on sales growth, were giving away free freight and expedited shipping and lowering prices to “win” deals. A shift in the compensation model and pricing policies, along with training and tools, has optimized both sales growth and margin expansion.
Invest in sales reps’ pricing capabilities. Sustained impact from pricing initiatives requires investment in sales reps’ capabilities to price based on value, negotiate, and manage contracts end to end—and success in wining sales reps’ hearts and minds. Pricing organizations can score quick wins across a distributed sales organization landscape by first piloting pricing initiatives in a few branches with willing general managers and pressure-testing them for impact. This builds credibility within the wider sales-and-marketing function, creating a pull from all other general managers.
A plumbing distributor launched a major pricing transformation with new policies, processes, and tools that sales reps had to master quickly. The pricing organization worked with the sales operations team to build a “train the trainer” curriculum followed by online training, leadership videos, an online chat forum, and a hotline for urgent questions. Sales reps understood the rationale for the changes, the long-term vision, and—most important—how and why previous pricing approaches had cost the company money. Moreover, sales managers and branch managers were integral parts of the solution: after gaining an understanding of pricing levers and the rationale for change, they became pricing champions within their teams.
Pricing optimizers hold the competitive advantage
When we talk with decision makers at distributors that have not invested in pricing optimization, we ask what’s holding them back. We caution them that if they maintain this stance, they will be at an increasing disadvantage as customers consolidate and invest in procurement capabilities and competitors arm their pricing organizations with highly effective new approaches and powerful digital tools.
Over the past ten years, the distribution marketplace has grown more competitive, with the average gross margin across a global index of distributors contracting by 100 basis points despite a stable and growing global economy. The contraction has not been universal, however: top performers have grown margins by an average of 400 basis points, widening the gap between distributors that excel in pricing and those that do not.
Distributors that understand the importance of pricing and have invested in a best-in-class pricing organization have seen margin uplifts of 200 to 500 basis points. Furthermore, they continue to drive margin improvement and expand their advantages over the laggards. For distributors, price optimization is an essential part of a winning strategy.
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July 23, 2013 · By Len Prokopets
Long advocated by expert observers of the supply chain scene, the Sales and Operations Planning process (S&OP) has reached a point of broad adoption.
A recent study performed by The Hackett Group indicates that almost 70 percent of study participants have implemented an S&OP process.1 However, the study also reveals a wide gulf between S&OP top performers and those that merely practice S&OP.
Not only do top performers apply S&OP best practices to a far greater extent, they also have begun to take the next step of integrating their S&OP and financial planning processes to drive true integrated business planning. As a result, top performing organizations find that S&OP is 68 percent more effective at driving benefits than it is for other organizations.
This article outlines study findings, provides key insights on challenges and opportunities, and offers a path forward for those seeking to join the ranks of S&OP top performers.
Let’s begin with a definition. We define Sales & Operations Planning as a collaborative decision-making process used to develop and align time-phased demand, supply, and financial plans in support of the overall business plan. S&OP is, by its nature, a cross-functional process that involves individuals from sales and marketing, supply chain, finance, procurement, logistics, and even R&D and capital projects.
S&OP Has Entered the Mainstream
First emerging well over 30 years ago, S&OP has moved from business buzzword status to mainstream adoption among the world’s large supply chain-focused organizations. A current Google search turns up over 860,000 entries and a search on professional networking site, LinkedIn, finds more than 16,000 individuals who list the term “S&OP” in their profiles.
Reflecting S&OP’s new mainstream status, The Hackett Group’s recent study finds that almost 70 percent of respondents have adopted an S&OP process with defined steps, milestones, and reviews that are executed on a defined monthly cadence (Exhibit 1). Only a small fraction of study respondents claimed “very limited or no adoption of S&OP.”
Almost 70% of Respondents Have Adopted Formal S&OP
Overall, these study findings are highly consistent with what we see on a day-to-day basis among our client base; the vast majority of our large clients with physical supply chains have implemented a formal S&OP process. And even among companies that have not deployed S&OP enterprise-wide, many apply S&OP to some degree in their business.
Benefits of a Mature S&OP Process
The appeal of S&OP lies in its ability to drive dramatic improvements in key business performance metrics. Our experience indicates that effective use of S&OP can help grow the top line of the business while reducing operating costs and reducing inventory required (see Exhibit 2). Few business improvement initiatives match the economic return that implementing an effective S&OP process can generate.
Business Benets of S&OP
Our study identified a group of S&OP top performers based on their ability to maximize benefits of S&OP and operate the process more effectively. Our findings show that these top performers have realized that to truly maximize benefits of S&OP they must go beyond simply implementing a basic S&OP process and conducting meetings on an ongoing basis.
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These companies develop highly mature S&OP processes that leverage key best practices and as a result, realize significant performance improvements and create an opportunity for competitive advantage. Our study findings indicate that top performer companies’ mature S&OP processes are 68 percent more effective at delivering benefits than are those of other organizations.
Our study has identified a dozen key best practices that differentiate S&OP processes of top performers from those of other organizations. (See sidebar on page 35 titled “12 Best Practices of S&OP.”) These best practices fall into three groups: Process, Organization, and Tools/Data. While adoption rates of the practices across these groups differ, the study indicates that top performers consistently adopt best practices at a higher rate than do other organizations.
On the whole, top performers adopted these S&OP best practices at a rate that is 52 percent higher than that of other organizations, developing more mature S&OP processes and delivering superior benefits.
When it comes to S&OP process best practices (see Exhibit 3), almost all top performers report having an S&OP process that is formalized in the organization with defined steps, milestones, and reviews that are executed on a defined monthly cadence. Top performers also report developing a single consensus demand plan that is used as an input to S&OP.
S&OP Process Best Practices
In addition, these organizations develop a robust supply plan that defines the manufacturing and supply operating activities required to meet demand and highlights supply constraints as well as situations where key parameters cannot be met (e.g., capacity utilization, inventory levels, operating cost levels).
Top performers also gear their S&OP processes to look out over a horizon of at least 18 months, producing an integrated business plan that balances supply and demand to meet targeted business objectives over that timeframe. Organizations that are not top performers lag in each one of these best practice capability areas.
Another trait of the top performers is to aggressively adopt organizational best practices (see Exhibit 4), surpassing adoption rates by other survey respondents by 44 percent. In our experience, organizational effectiveness is a key ingredient to S&OP success, enabling ongoing governance and continuous improvement of the process.
S&OP Organizational Best Practices
Almost all top performer organizations report participation by sales, marketing, demand planning, supply planning, finance and procurement functions in their S&OP process. They also report that their S&OP processes are owned by senior leadership.
Effective ownership by senior leadership typically includes the following elements:
Setting and communicating goals and expectations for the overall process.
Measuring the entire team as well as themselves against the goals each period.
Participating in the process in a visible, active way.
Using all available information to make data-driven decisions to resolve issues.
Owning and adhering to the plans developed through the S&OP process.
Top performers also set formal performance targets and assign accountability for achieving those targets. The targets are typically specific quantifiable goals with defined timeframes in areas such as working capital improvement, cost reduction, customer or product growth, forecast accuracy improvement, supply gap reduction, and process participation.
Download the White Paper:Successful Sales and Operations Planning in 5 Steps
Top performers also have developed the organizational discipline to stick to and carry out decisions reached as part of their S&OP processes.
In organizations that lack such discipline, inevitable day-to-day firefighting and changes in business priorities provide excuses for lack of follow-through and failure to execute on decisions and actions defined in S&OP.
As a result, S&OP effectiveness can be severely limited.
Top performers also are significantly ahead of other organizations in system enablement of S&OP (see Exhibit 5), reporting adoption levels that are 66 percent higher.
Most top performers have system/tool capabilities in place to produce trend reports, exception reports, and performance dashboards to support Integrated Business Plan review and ongoing improvement.
They have the tools and systems needed to bring together and reconcile demand plans and supply plans at a granular enough level to identify gaps and imbalances between those plans. They also have put in place tools and systems to conduct what-if modeling in order to evaluate and resolve those supply/demand gaps and imbalances.
Once they produce an Integrated Business Plan at the conclusion of the S&OP process, they are able to feed the plan directly into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) systems.
S&OP Tools/Data Best Practices
While top performers are substantially ahead of other organizations in this area, systems tools and data capabilities remain the weak link of their S&OP capabilities. In our experience, even top performers struggle to build robust S&OP tools and data.
One key reason is that ERP packages and other enterprise tools do not come configured to effectively support S&OP “off the shelf.” To overcome this system support gap, top performers work over time to develop operational and performance reporting, data interfaces, tools to reconcile and align demand and supply, as well as tools that enable modeling of what-if scenarios.
The lack of off-the-shelf ERP support for typical S&OP requirements also means that the systems and tools developed—even those of top performer organizations—are often homegrown using Microsoft Excel and Access.
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A number of packaged solutions have recently emerged that provide key functionality to enable and automate S&OP activities such as planning, reporting, and analysis. As these solutions are more widely adopted and as ERP packages add S&OP related functionality in the coming years, we anticipate further adoption of best practice capabilities of the tools and data associated with S&OP.
Integration with Financial Planning
A traditional, limited, definition of S&OP focuses on balancing the organization’s supply and demand and resolving supply disruptions and shortages. In our experience, organizations with immature S&OP view the process in this limited way. In fact, our study indicates that outside the ranks of top performers, 75 percent of organizations execute this traditional “blocking and tackling” version of S&OP.
Top performers, however, have realized that S&OP can play a role that is much more valuable than that of balancing supply and demand. They believe that S&OP can serve as a process for business management and optimization. These companies have integrated their S&OP and financial planning processes, enabling true Integrated Business Planning. In effect, they have identified a thirteenth best practice that builds upon the first 12.
Our study indicates that almost 88 percent of S&OP top performers have integrated S&OP and financial planning as compared to only 25 percent of non top-performers.
The 250 percent difference in rate of adoption of Integrated Business Planning is truly striking. In our experience, organizations that have adopted this capability have been able to realize the greatest value from S&OP.
Adopting Integrated Business Planning enables top performers to link business execution activities (sales and marketing, manufacturing, and procurement as well as other functions) across functions and to better align them with the organization’s business plan.
Exhibit 6 depicts the components of the end-to-end Integrated Business Planning process. With the degree of integration that this process provides, senior leadership has the ability to understand impact of decisions on the business as a whole and can take steps to “optimize” business performance.
Components of Integrated Business Planning
Enabling Integrated Business Planning relies on a number of key building blocks. Top performer organizations typically bring together the following elements to support an Integrated Business Planning environment:
An integrated process for generating and aligning the plans of the individual functions.
A common/aligned planning calendar defining milestone dates.
A common planning time horizon (for example, 18 months).
Planning assumptions that are aligned across the organization.
Standardized and aligned metrics and targets across the organization.
An integrated cross-functional data model enabling rapid integration of cross-functional plans.
A culture that enables effective cross-functional collaboration.
Cross-functional modeling of business scenarios to understand full business impacts.
Development of a single integrated plan that can be fed back to individual processes/subsystems.
For top performer organizations, this shift toward integrated S&OP and financial planning processes has coincided with a dramatic change in the role that finance plays in the organization.
Download the White Paper:Successful Sales and Operations Planning in 5 Steps
Finance’s traditional role has been to “record the numbers”, keep score of performance relative to the budget, serve as the source for financial data (costs, pricing, and so forth), and conduct analysis to answer the organizations questions about performance.
The finance role that is emerging is to “Lead the organization in making the numbers.” This new role entails the following: coordinating the overall Integrated Business Planning process; defining priorities and targets for key business metrics; driving business decision-making; and supporting a broader range of what-if analysis to support cross-functional business decisions.
Capability Gaps of the Lesser Performers
Turning now to the lagging companies, our experience indicates that organizations that are not S&OP top performers struggle with a number of gaps, hampering full adoption of the S&OP process and limiting benefit realization.
The study confirms this experience; non-top-performer organizations reported facing ten major S&OP capability gaps, as shown in Exhibit 7. Among those, a majority of respondents reported five or more gaps in their S&OP capabilities. The gaps cited most frequently are limited what-if modeling, a short-term focus, and inaccurate demand forecasts.
Organizations Outside Top-Performer Ranks Report 10 Key Capability Gaps
Case Study of an S&OP Top Performer
The following case study highlights many of the best practices associated with putting a successful S&OP into action. The company, a $1billion-plus manufacturer, faced a set of business and operational challenges. The external business environment was unfavorable, with weak customer demand and rising costs. At the same time, the organization experienced many of the typical capability gaps resulting from an immature S&OP process.
The supply chain was unstable, providing poor customer service levels while operating inefficiently. In particular:
Customer service levels were sub-par, with order fill rates averaging below 96 percent in an industry where customers expect 98.5 percent.
Protracted product outages resulted in major disruptions for key customers, endangering major account relationships.
Significant manufacturing variances arose, driven by frequent changes in the production schedule, at times made to satisfy unexpected demand and at others made in reaction to materials or packaging shortages.
Sales and marketing lacked the confidence to plan promotions and new sales due to concerns that supply chain would be unable to respond.
Furthermore, financial performance surprises were routine, frustrating senior leadership and precipitating a monthly game of “whack-a-mole” that included chasing and firefighting the latest set of issues.
Facing pressure to improve business performance, the organization’s senior leadership team initiated a project to put in place world-class Integrated Business Planning/S&OP capabilities. The effort consisted of three phases:
Phase 1: Preparation
The organization took action to rapidly stabilize its supply chain environment, identifying and addressing underlying gaps and disconnects in demand, supply, and financial processes and tackling major issues and risks for specific products to stabilize the business.
The organization designed and implemented S&OP capability improvements in each of the 12 best practice areas in process, organization, and tools/data. Examples include:
Established a formal monthly S&OP process including repeatable tools, templates, and approaches for gap modeling and resolution.
Shifted focus of the S&OP process from planning the current quarter to planning a rolling 18-month period.
Established visible C-level ownership of the process and hands-on involvement in monthly meetings.
Developed an integrated data model as a “single source of truth” for supply, demand, cost, and pricing data enabling the linking plans and metrics across business functions.
Developed operating and performance reports to support S&OP.
Built analytical tools to support what-if analysis and scenario modeling.
The organization integrated its S&OP and financial planning processes, creating a single monthly process for Integrated Business Planning:
S&OP plans and what-if analyses were translated into dollar terms focusing decision-making on business performance impacts.
A P&L, generated for each month in the planning horizon as part of the S&OP process, became the financial plan, eliminating the need for a separate financial planning process.
Established a framework for continuous improvement of S&OP with a balanced set of quarterly targets for business performance and for improvement in process execution.
Phase 2: Conduct Pilot Cycles
After a rapid effort to implement improvements in S&OP process, organization, and tools/data elements, the organization conducted three pilot cycles of the improved S&OP process.
The pilot cycles were used as an opportunity to train process participants and prepare them to operate in an Integrated Business Planning environment.
The S&OP design was refined with each successive cycle leading to a full launch after an executive leadership go/no-go review.
Phase 3: Implement Continuous Improvement
The organization monitored S&OP performance and process execution measures and defined necessary changes and actions to drive improvement.
Tools and templates were refined over time. The company transitioned tools that had been built in Microsoft Excel and Access to leverage more powerful enterprise toolsets such as the ERP system, financial planning system, and supply chain system.
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The project yielded exceptional results, providing senior leadership with the tools to better manage the business and driving substantial operational and economic improvements.
Customer service fill rates rose from 4th quartile to 1st quartile in four months, consistently achieving targeted 98.5 percent fill rates.
Simultaneously, finished goods inventory was reduced by 10 percent. Expediting was substantially reduced enabling reduction in raw material and packaging costs.
Finally, the improved stability of the supply chain enabled management to redesign and rationalize the manufacturing network, reducing overhead costs by 10 percent.
How to Become an S&OP Top Performer
Achieving S&OP top performer capabilities and performance requires a focused effort, dedicated, knowledgeable resources, and at least six months.
Such a project is typically comprised of three phases: Preparation, S&OP Pilot Cycles, and Continuous Improvement. Exhibit 8 provides a sample implementation approach.
Sample Implementation Approach for Achieving Top-Performer Capabilities
In many organizations, an initial S&OP assessment reveals gaps, breakdowns, and individual supply, demand, and financial and business plans that are ineffective and can complicate or prevent implementation of overall S&OP capabilities. In these organizations, an additional triage and stabilization step may be necessary to address gaps and disconnects and establish a starting point for developing an Integrated Business Planning process.
Once the current S&OP environment has been stabilized, the typical next step is to develop the future state design. This design should, among other changes, put in place the 12 key best practices across S&OP process, S&OP organization, and S&OP tools/data (see below).
12 Best Practices of S&OP
Processes
1. A formal, defined S&OP process.
2. A single consensus demand plan.
3. S&OP that looks out over a period of 18-plus months.
4. A supply plan that defines requirements to meet demand and highlights constraints.
Organization
5. Cross-functional participation in S&OP.
6. S&OP process is senior-leadership owned.
7. Formal targets with accountability are in place.
8. Discipline in the organization to adhere to S&OP decisions.
Tools/Data
9. S&OP reporting and performance dashboards.
10. S&OP plans fed directly into core WERP and EPM systems.
11. Ability to reconcile demand and supply plans and identify gaps and imbalances.
12. Ability to conduct what-if modeling supporting S&OP decisions.
Once a critical mass of process, organization, and tools/data capabilities are in place, the next step is often to execute a series of monthly pilot cycles, putting into action the new S&OP design. Pilot cycles allow for trial and error and course corrections. They also help build the organization’s comfort level and “muscle memory” to enable sustained execution of the process.
Once the pilot cycles are completed, organizations typically transition to a mode of continuous improvement that focuses on measuring performance, addressing issues and gaps, and executing further improvements in S&OP capabilities on an ongoing basis.
As top performers have experienced, a mature, best-practice-based S&OP process is a very powerful mechanism for managing the business and maximizing performance. Through a strong governance process and continuous progress, these improvements can be sustained over time, leading to a significant competitive advantage for the organization.
Longer-Term: Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)
10 best practices you should be doing now
March 22, 2011Bob EngelNo Comments
In today's economic environment, doing what you've always done—even if you do it very well—is no longer acceptable. Under pressure to contain costs and produce results despite challenging circumstances, you (and many other supply chain managers) must transform rather than simply improve your operation. That means adopting the philosophies, methods, and processes that will make your organization "best in class."
What makes a supply chain organization best in class? The answer will vary for each company, but there are some practices that many leading companies are adopting now. This article will outline 10 of the key practices that I and my colleagues have observed through our work as supply chain consultants with clients in a variety of industries and locations.
I do not pretend to have a precise roadmap for achieving the desired level of supply chain maturity and excellence in your particular organization. The sequence of the 10 practices, moreover, does not indicate priority or suggest a higher or lower importance ranking. It does, however, offer a systematic approach for measuring your effectiveness in building a best-in-class supply chain organization.
Some of these practices may be simple, straightforward, and familiar. Others may be new to your company. Implement them all and you will have a strong foundation for supply chain excellence.
1. Establish a governing supply chain council. A governing council's purpose is to give direction and help align supply chain strategy with the company's overall strategy. The council's membership should include the leader of the supply chain organization as well as corporate executives, business unit managers, and other influential company leaders. Ideally the council should hold regularly scheduled meetings. But even if it doesn't, its mere existence will indicate that supply chain management has the endorsement and commitment of senior leadership.
We often see supply chain organizations struggling for recognition because their objectives and strategies differ from their companies' stated objectives and strategies. A governing council can prevent that from happening by providing constant, consistent validation that the supply chain strategy directly correlates with the corporate strategy.
The council can also help to remove barriers to success that exist within the organization. Every company has such barriers—usually individuals or organizations that don't see or accept the value that a wellmanaged supply chain provides. By addressing these barriers, members of the council help to ensure that the supply chain organization is given the opportunity to perform up to its potential. When it is clear that the executive leadership is fully embracing the supply chain organization, it is likely that key business-unit stakeholders will be more willing to work with and support supply chain efforts and initiatives.
Finally, the council provides an effective forum for cross-functional communication. An active governing council creates an opportunity for business unit leaders to provide the supply chain management leadership with information regarding future strategies and projects.
2. Properly align and staff the supply chain organization. It can be difficult to organize the supply chain function in a way that will maximize its effectiveness and bring commensurate benefits to the company. Some companies are best served by embedding proficient supply chain management professionals in various business units. For others, a more centralized operation is most effective. Many of the progressive companies we have worked with, however, have adopted a hybrid approach that combines a centralized strategy to gain consensus with decentralized execution to improve service.
Another emerging trend we have seen involves placing procurement, logistics, contract management, and forecasting/demand planning and similar management functions under the supply chain leader. This approach, depicted in Figure 1, is not appropriate for all companies, but it does give an idea of current thinking about supply chain management and the reporting structure.
Whatever structure you adopt, correctly staffing the supply chain organization is vital to success. Elevating staff members' supply chain management skills and knowledge is always a priority, of course. But top leadership focuses more on strategy and is less concerned about transactional ability. As supply chain leaders move up to join their companies' management teams, therefore, they must have additional characteristics. Best-in-class companies hire supply chain managers who have strong communication and relationship management skills (both internally and externally), the ability to think strategically, and a focus on value creation.
3. Make technology work for you. Too many companies select software they hope will make them more efficient, and they structure their workflows and processes around that chosen technology. Instead, they should first review the processes that need improvement, and only then select the technology that best satisfies those process needs. That may seem self-evident, but I have seen more than a few companies buy first and figure things out later.
Perhaps that is why in many companies, the supply chain organization seems to be "feeding the system" (such as an enterprise resource planning system) with information, and they have difficulty retrieving the type of data they need for making sound strategy and business decisions.
At best-in-class companies, by contrast, managers understand that "the system" should help them better manage their supply chains. They find a way to use technology to produce beneficial information without having to perform various "work-arounds" to extract and view the data. They recognize the importance of an efficient purchase-to-pay process and have adopted strategies and mechanisms to get the greatest benefits from technology.
4. Establish alliances with key suppliers. Best-in-class companies work closely with suppliers long after a deal has been signed. In most circles today, this is called "supplier relationship management." But that implies one-way communication (telling the supplier how to do it). Two-way communication, which requires both buyer and seller to jointly manage the relationship, is more effective. A more appropriate term for this best practice might be "alliance management," with representatives from both parties working together to enhance the buyer/supplier relationship.
The four primary objectives of an effective alliance management program with key suppliers include:
Provide a mechanism to ensure that the relationship stays healthy and vibrant
Create a platform for problem resolution
Develop continuous improvement goals with the objective of achieving value for both parties
Ensure that performance measurement objectives are achieved
With a sound alliance management program in place, you will be equipped to use the talents of your supply base to create sustained value while constantly seeking improvement.
10 ideas from best-in-class supply chain organizations
Many leading companies have adopted these 10 best practices. Some may be familiar while others may be new to your company. Implement them all and you will have a strong foundation for supply chain excellence.
Establish a governing supply chain council
Properly align and staff the supply chain organization
Make technology work for you
Establish alliances with key suppliers
Engage in collaborative strategic sourcing
Focus on total cost of ownership, not price
Put contracts under the supply chain function
Optimize company-owned inventory
Establish appropriate levels of control and minimize risk
Take green initiatives and social responsibility seriously
5. Engage in collaborative strategic sourcing. Strategic sourcing is a cornerstone of successful supply chain management. But a collaborative strategic sourcing initiative produces even better results.
Rather than consider strategic sourcing as just a matter for the purchasing department, best-in-class organizations get internal "customers" actively involved in the decision-making process. More importantly, they solicit feedback and information regarding their objectives and strategies from those customers, which may include functional areas such as finance and accounting, engineering, operations, maintenance, safety/health/environment, and quality assurance—any internal business unit or function that will contribute to the initiative's success. This approach not only ensures availability of supplies but also results in lower total cost, streamlined processes, and increased responsiveness to customers' changing needs.
6. Focus on total cost of ownership (TCO), not price. One benefit of strategic sourcing is that it shifts the focus from looking only at the purchase price to understanding the total cost of owning or consuming a product or service. For significant spend areas, procurement teams at best-in-class companies are abandoning the outmoded practice of receiving multiple bids and selecting a supplier simply on price. Instead, they consider many other factors that affect the total cost of ownership. This makes good sense when you consider that acquisition costs account for only 25 to 40 percent of the total cost for most products and services. The balance (and majority) of the total comprises operating, training, maintenance, warehousing, environmental, quality, and transportation costs as well as the cost to salvage the product's value later on.
Identifying the total cost of ownership requires looking at the entire process of procuring and consuming the product or service, something that can only happen with cooperation and input from both the buyer and the seller. Best-in-class organizations do not stop there, however. They also ask suppliers and internal stakeholders the following important question: "How can we work together to reduce the total cost of ownership?"
Establishing a "total cost of ownership" mindset is a goal that the supply management organization needs to embrace and perpetuate throughout the entire enterprise. It will not be easy, however, to convince your company's executive leadership to truly prioritize value over price. Since the global financial collapse in 2009, most chief executives have focused on cost reductions, which they expect will translate to reduced prices.
7. Put contracts under the supply chain function. Purchasing and procurement teams often negotiate significant potential savings during the sourcing process but never fully realize those savings. The reasons for this vary, but they often include a failure to communicate contract terms to the affected organizations and a failure to monitor contract compliance.
All too often, in fact, the executed contract is filed away in some drawer and forgotten. This is no exaggeration; several years ago, the research firm Aberdeen Group asked supply managers the following question in a survey: "How do you manage your company's contracts?" Their answers were startling. Twothirds of the respondents stated, "We can't even find the contracts, much less manage them."
More companies are moving responsibility for contract management to the supply chain organization rather than leaving it in purchasing, legal, finance, or operations. One benefit of this shift is that it ensures the contracts are collected and maintained in a central repository. The migration of the contract management function to the supply chain organization also allows the supply chain leader to more effectively leverage the company's spend, particularly in the area of services, where there is a great opportunity for cost reduction and risk mitigation.
8. Optimize company-owned inventory. The global economic downturn means that more chief financial officers have put inventory on their radar screens, and their financial teams are constantly looking for new ways to improve the bottom line and reduce working capital. Supply chain organizations should therefore constantly review their inventory quantities and strive to keep them at an optimal level.
It's no surprise that best-in-class companies are paying attention to inventory at the highest levels. The "real" cost of holding inventory often is higher than the generally assumed 20 to 25 percent. In fact, recent research reveals that inventory holding costs could represent up to 60 percent of the cost of an item that is held in inventory for 12 months. Those findings included the holding cost of insurance, taxes, obsolescence, and warehousing.
Poor planning and forecasting are direct causes of inventories that are out of balance with a business's needs. Accordingly, best-in-class companies also are placing more emphasis on demand planning and forecasting as an additional means of ensuring optimal inventory levels.
9. Establish appropriate levels of control and minimize risk. Supply chain management policies and procedures should follow an appropriate sequence and structure, and it is important to review them frequently (if not constantly) and bring them up to date. Keeping them realistic and easy to understand and follow will help to ensure compliance.
It is certainly possible to go too far in establishing policies and procedures, however. That is why bestin- class companies periodically review their policies and controls to ensure that they are not creating bottlenecks. Their objective is to streamline them without sacrificing the ability of those controls to deter theft, fraud, and other problems.
Risk mitigation goes hand-in-hand with policies and controls, and best-in-class supply chain organizations integrate risk-mitigation methodologies into their sourcing decision process. This is a complicated subject that we can touch on only briefly here, but in short, these organizations are adopting sound methodologies that include: (1) identifying all of the risk elements, (2) determining the probability of the risk event occurring, (3) assessing the dollar impact on the sourcing decision if the risk event actually takes place, and (4) prioritizing risks for monitoring and prevention.
10. Take "green" initiatives and social responsibility seriously. Reducing a supply chain's carbon footprint is no longer a "nice but not necessary" practice. It's likely that a carbon- trading regime will be established in the United States at some point. But here's another reason why best-in-class companies "go green": buyers and consumers are taking environmental impact into consideration when they choose suppliers. That is why organizations such as Dun & Bradstreet now produce reports that evaluate "green" companies. We're also seeing more and more requests for proposal (RFPs) that ask suppliers and service providers to provide information about their green initiatives.
Buyers and consumers are also considering social responsibility when making purchases. Social responsibility consists of a framework of measurable corporate policies and procedures that result in behavior designed to benefit the workplace, the individual, the organization, and the community. Social responsibility is playing an increasingly significant role in best-inclass supply management organizations' decisions, not just when it comes to purchasing but also in regard to risk evaluation. A company that does not have a meaningful social responsibility program risks criticism from workers and/or consumers.
ROADMAP FOR RELEVANCE
The 10 best practices described above do not represent a complete list of every action that top-tier supply chain management leaders are engaging in now. This list does, however, provide some ideas and perhaps a roadmap for a supply chain organization that is striving to be viewed as valued and relevant to its parent company.
Even if you already have implemented many of these practices, the insights and examples offered here will serve to validate your current strategy. And if you aren't taking all of these steps, then adding the remaining ones to your lineup will help you complete your transformation to a best-in-class supply chain organization.
There is indeed a role for science in S&OP more long-term. Pricing scenarios can consider projected costs, including potential tariffs for future periods, to compare financial impacts and choose the right approach by pricing segment and customer segment. Price elasticity is a key component in recommending better prices in different scenarios to test and select the best way to achieve desired financial objectives for future periods. These science-driven decisions feed directly into S&OP processes as alternatives for evaluation.
Inventory Optimization for Alternative Trade-Offs
Inventory optimization can also be applied to consider alternative supply chain configurations, such as alternate distribution center locations, evaluating forward buying opportunities in advance of supplier cost changes, and other long-term inventory and service level trade-offs.
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting, pricing: fruit & vegetable packing
An unconstrained forecast from pricing systems isn’t enough. Supply chain and inventory constraints must be considered to evaluate alternate plans. Strategic planning organizations spend more time evaluating planning decisions to understand the optimal way to invest in inventory to maximize customer service and free working capital.
IBP: The Next-Gen S&OP Solution
Demand forecasting also plays a key role in long-term S&OP processes. Integrated Business Planning (IBP), the next generation of S&OP solutions, extends S&OP processes from within a company’s four walls to include downstream customers. These customer-level demand forecasts provide additional inputs to drive to a consensus forecast.
Effective IBP also includes upstream suppliers to provide better insight into planned demand changes to feed rough-cut capacity planning; production scheduling and other sourcing; assembly; and manufacturing processes. Once a consensus long-term forecast is chosen, direct integration with tactical demand forecasts is critical to ensure demand planning and purchase order recommendations are updated. This is especially critical for communications to suppliers with extremely long lead times to avoid inventory shortfalls.
Modern Tools Support Collaborative Planning and Forecasting
These three key scientific techniques combine to improve IBP process outcomes and supplement collaborative and effective sales operations planning across a company, downstream to customers, and upstream to suppliers. This is especially important in the face of increasing supply chain complexity. Distributors face an even greater challenge as they increase assortment sizes while combating the “Amazon effect” rapidly entering distribution.
Applying Price and Revenue Optimization for Demand Shaping
In our first post on optimizing supply and demand through demand shaping, we expanded upon the traditional definition of demand shaping to mean a process where the optimal demand and supply decisions are made by using all available supply and demand information.
We also discussed one method, what-if analysis, that organizations can use to move from demand manipulation to the extended definition of demand shaping. For example, an oil company might want to know how to allocate their capital (that is expected to last years) when the price of oil decreases due to government policy. The scenario would be simulated and compared to a baseline, allowing the oil company to determine how to get the best return for their shareholders.
In part two, we will explore optimizing price and revenue, the second method for achieving demand shaping. We’ll share how this method allows an organization to achieve optimal supply and demand alignment for their business.
Price and Revenue Optimization
Optimizing revenue and price allows organizations to explore alternative and optimal demand options such as pricing, promotions and substitutes to maximize profitability and revenue while accounting for the supply chain constraints. In other words, the demand dynamics are placed into an optimization model while the relevant constraints are applied, allowing an organization to explore the different demand dynamics.
For example, a computer manufacturing organization has a limited amount of raw resources — such as circuit boards — but they want to know the different promotional strategies and pricing options they could use, given their limited amount of raw resources. This allows them to find the most profitable pricing for their current resource allocation.
Since seeing the success that hotel companies and airlines have had with price and revenue optimization, these methods are now being applied in retail, manufacturing, and CPG industries. They are relatively complex and require the development of new algorithms, hence this approach is still being perfected. (Learn more about the up-and-coming area of algorithmic business in this blog post.)
What-if Analysis in Price and Revenue Optimization
As you may have noticed, the what-if analysis and price/revenue optimization methods are two different approaches to help organizations move beyond demand manipulation. However, both approaches use different models and answer different questions.
What-if analysis allows users to evaluate alternative strategies and policies to maximize their revenue and profit performance while considering risks and supply chain constraints. Typically, the demand options are developed by running an econometric model. Those demand options are then used in an optimization model to determine proper resource allocation.
This means that what-if analysis focuses on the ability of the supply organization to support the presented demand, which is a resource allocation problem. It answers questions such as, “Can we fill this order?”
A price and revenue optimization approach skips the econometric model. As noted above, the demand dynamics are ran through an optimization model instead. This means that a price and revenue approach focuses on the ability of the supply organization to change demand. This method goes one step further than what-if analysis and allows organizations to answer two very important questions: “Can we satisfy this order?” and most important, “Should we accept this order?”
With this knowledge, organizations can give themselves a competitive advantage while maximizing revenue and profit.
Three Benefits of Optimizing Revenue and Price
The price and revenue optimization method allows organization to achieve production and sales goals while balancing the rapid fluctuation of supply and demand by taking into account both the demand and supply dynamics. There are multiple reasons an organization would want to pursue using this approach to demand shaping.
Financial Optimization: This approach allows organizations maximize the profit and revenue on their resources. They have a model to answer whether or not they should fulfill an order.
Flexible Demand Options: As opposed to evaluating demand options in the light of an organization’s resources, they can explore different demand options that will result in an optimal outcome.
Competitive Advantage: Due to complexity, many organizations do not use this approach to its full-advantage. This provides a competitive advantage for any organization that uses this approach.
Closing Remarks
This concludes our two-part series on demand shaping. In this series, we extended the idea of demand shaping to include all possible supply and demand information. The benefits to an organization that shifts to demand shaping, as opposed to using demand manipulation, are increased profitability, financial optimization and a large competitive advantage.
The two approaches we looked at were a what-if analysis and a optimizing revenue and price. Either of these approaches give an organization a significant competitive weapon.
An organization’s ability to execute this type of demand shaping requires a well-built analytical engine that models the complexity of the supply and demand dynamics in real-time while considering all the goals, constraints and financial variables of the business.
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting
And yet many distributors are not only surviving, they’re thriving in this new competitive landscape. What differentiates success from failure right now is not just the ability of an organization to understand how each disruptor will affect their business. Companies succeed when they’re able to incorporate a disruptor into their current commerce strategy, and use it to their advantage.
Five primary disruptors have emerged that distributors simply cannot ignore. From an increasing demand for pricing transparency, to customer experience expectations, the following areas within B2B e-commerce can create a massive competitive edge when handled effectively.
1—Pricing Complexity. Some experts say we’re currently facing a pricing war within distribution, while others argue it’s a “value” war. Actually, both of these statements are true, but let’s start by talking about pricing. B2B researchers and buyers prefer to complete low-value tasks online, in a self-service fashion. We also know that transparent pricing offered outside the portal can lure potential buyers looking for the best deal on commodity products.
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Customer quotes for complex buys still need to occur within the confines of the e-commerce system. But distributors who can reduce their reliance on complex manual quoting by incorporating price transparency into their strategy will experience a double win. They’ll drive new customer interest, and at the same time reduce the cost of sales. When distribution companies don’t have to allocate people resources to manage complex pricing, they reduce the cost to serve their customers. Distribution companies are very focused on margins and when sales people are less involved in pricing, the margins are usually higher.
2—The Customer Experience. Pricing is not the only way that customer expectations are changing as the B2B commerce cycle moves online, and this is where the “value” war comes into play. A well-known 2016 study from customer experience consulting firm Walker Information Inc. reported that by the next decade customer experience will overtake price and product as the primary differentiator.
For distributors (and the rest of the B2B industry as well) this does not mean that delivering a superior online buying experience alone will win the day. It means the organizations that create customer experiences that adapt to the needs of business buyers—including when those needs require the full-service attention of a sales or service rep—will be the organizations that succeed.
The key to understanding the disruption of the B2B customer experience is that it’s not as much about dynamic personalization, as it is in B2C e-commerce. It’s about the ability of each person involved within commerce to do their job more efficiently as a result of the new digital capability.
For example, there are many people involved in the buying cycle in B2B, but for sales representatives it’s vital that they can access current order histories and other information via some kind of mobile device. They need to see current pricing that may be unique to a particular customer and products that that customer often purchases or approves for purchase. Sales reps also need to check the availability of items in real time, or even order samples during the meetings. Obviously, the ability to access real-time information anywhere at any time maximizes efficiency for both the representative and the customer.
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3—The Mobile Experience. Right now we’re seeing a lot of distributors with responsive websites that do not satisfy all the mobile needs of the customer or the personnel supporting them. It’s too bad, because mobile represents a huge opportunity for differentiation. It’s also an area within commerce where a strong mobile experience in the form of a fully functional native app can compete with Amazon on the logistics side, and with mega-markets on the experience side.
Mobile also has the potential to transform the manner in which people work in the field, from the field service technician finding a part simply by taking a picture, to the sales representative troubleshooting a customer problem. The good news here is that fully functional mobile apps are no longer an expensive pursuit, thanks to the availability of configurable apps embedded within the top e-commerce solutions.
4—Post-Purchase Activity. Both mobile and desktop applications need to be focused on what happens after the purchase, so both value and revenue can help achieve objectives of the e-commerce system. The last phase of the buying cycle is also where many opportunities (and customers) are often lost as buyers drop out of an unsatisfactory digital experience.
Focusing on improving the experience after the buy is completed can improve efficiency, build brand loyalty, and even grow share of wallet. For example, understanding how to incorporate features like 2-hour or same-day delivery, logistics updates, and other sophisticated fulfillment capabilities can help widen a competitive advantage. Incorporating personalized promotions and digitally-prompted events like re-orders can grow revenue without increasing the cost of sales. And a smooth, reliable buying experience from start to finish can build digital trust quickly, supporting the traditional customer-brand relationships and in some cases, replacing them.
5—The Role of Sales. I’ve mentioned the importance of paying attention to the complex roles within B2B commerce, but one stands out in terms of the overall change that’s occurring. Although it’s clear that we’ll never see the “death of the B2B salesperson” as previously predicted, we are seeing a massive transformation in terms of the requirements for that role. Digital commerce done well removes low-value tasks from the plate of the sales rep.
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Instead, salespeople need to step up to new responsibilities that are highly consultative. Armed with the right information, the sales rep can now be seen as the “manager” of the customer journey, only stepping in when it makes sense to do so from both a cost and efficiency standpoint. Examples might be to solve a customer problem, or to handle a more complex purchase.
Understanding the evolving role of the sales rep is not just a disruption, it’s a critical success factor. Distributors who don’t spend time training their salesforces to succeed in this new paradigm (and dealing with those that can’t make the transition) will find themselves losing in both the price and the value wars.
The impact of each of these disruptors on any individual distributor will vary based on the maturity of their industry, and how far along they are with digital transformation. But no matter the business, and regardless of the company’s commerce evolution, paying attention to these disruptors is critical to building a long lasting B2B commerce strategy.
Fresh produce supply chain planning, demand forecasting