Page 381 - Orlicky's Material Requirements Planning

360 PART 3 Managing with the MRP System

9. Customized S&OP. Beware of prescription and one size fits all. Yes, the concept
is applicable, but S&OP has to be tailored to your business needs. The dimen-
sions of values and behaviors, processes, and resources must be understood.
Our experience clearly shows that behavior change, data integrity, and simple
integrated software are major issues to address in ensuring that your S&OP
process delivers sustainable business results.
S&OP is applicable to all businesses—manufacturing or service, small or large, glob-
ally integrated or single site. Any company that desires transparency and the develop-
ment of cross-functional strengths and medium- to long-term success can benefit.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dick Ling and Andy Coldrick have been collaborating on S&OP for 25 years. They are a
very strong partnership and specialize in pushing the boundaries of S&OP. They help
businesses all over the world to maximize S&OP’s potential to generate more cash and
increase profits. Dick created S&OP, and he and Andy are two of the leading thinkers and
consultants on its evolution and advancement. They both now live in the United States
and are working together even more closely. They assist clients with breakthrough suc-
cess in implementing right-to-left S&OP.
They led the thinking on aligning the S&OP process with the strategic intent of the
business and future portfolio. Before that they were the first to recognize that new-prod-
uct activity and financial links into traditional S&OP were treated as afterthoughts but
were not being truly integrated. They pioneered integration of these two pieces and also
created the integrated reconciliation step to explode the single-number myth in vogue at
the time. The importance of understanding change, assumption management, and sce-
nario planning with a range of views all reinforced management’s need for information
that built knowledge and know-how rather than data just supplying more and more num-
bers. This led to the discovery that breakthrough S&OP necessitates strong cross-func-
tional leadership and behavior. Using a range of views also presented the need to use a
different process from the traditional demand/supply balancing model. During that time,
they encountered companies in complex environments. Clients in just North America
implement S&OP in one very large country—the United States. Europe is dealing with a
more complex picture, having clusters of countries, and in many cases these clusters are
combined into a region such as Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. In the 1990s, Europe
and Asia were microcosms of the global picture. Dick and Andy pioneered the way to
implement integrated S&OP in global, regional, and country environments based on expe-
rience in Europe. Their ability to work anywhere in the world with multinationals built an
unrivaled experience in helping businesses maximize the benefits of global S&OP while
understanding potential road blocks with different cultures, expectations, and systems.
Working with small developing countries within a regional context, together with
parallel experience in helping small independent businesses, gave them the insights nec-
essary for a simplified S&OP approach, albeit a three-step process.