Navigating Current Global Business Challenges with SIOP & Demand Volatility
The Value of Alignment: Sales, Operations & Finance
Alignment might sound like a fluffy concept but it delivers bottom line results. Our most successful clients have achieved the most substantial results from alignment. Although SIOP (Sales, Inventory, Operations Planning) gets a wrap as a technical topic, in our experience, it is the alignment portion of SIOP that delivers [...]
How Resilient Are Your Business Partners?
As we kick off our new series “The Resilient Supply Chain”, we are thinking about resiliency from all angles that will impact success. One of the first that pops to mind is the resilience of your business partners. You and your company could be 100% proactive and resilient; however, [...]
Are You Asking Good Questions?
There is a shocking number of clients and colleagues that struggle, gather teams, run kaizen events and do all sorts of other activities (and throw good money after bad more frequently than anyone cares to admit) to improve operations (improve the customer experience / service levels at greater profit [...]
Why Customer Service Trumps All!
Start with building a customer service culture with your employees to give your clients reason to come back and refer you to others. Although we work on many topics impacting manufacturers and distributors, we have found that the most popular - and vital - is customer service. Prior to [...]
Why Blame Doesn’t Work
September 16, 2016 I've been spending the majority of my time this week with two clients: one is preparing to go live on a new ERP system and the other is working to improve service levels by implementing improved planning and order flow processes. Although these specific objectives are [...]
Plan the Work; Work the Plan
Oftentimes we spend countless hours planning a project with details, responsibilities and timelines, only to forget to work the plan. Once a plan is done, refocus your energy to execution. We were reminded of this favorite client project and success story related to processes recently as we were talking [...]
The Value of Process Flows
Being a systems pragmatist is critical in not making assumptions about your processes, but rather review every production step to uncover any issues that were not being addressed. When the idea of The Systems Pragmatist service line popped to mind, I was thinking about the critical importance of systems [...]