Upcoming - StrategieTage Supply Chain Management

Stefan Hauenschild

The “StrategieTage Supply Chain Management & Production & Procurement” Event on November 19th and 20th at the Schlosshotel in Bensberg will provide the opportunity for exchange between customers and experts from the Supply Chain and Procurement area.

We will present bpExperts, as a company and trusted advisory partner with our Business Flows reference model and transformation framework, our Business Transformation and Business Process Management methodology, as well as Business Integration topics. Due to the interdisciplinary and integrative character of Supply Chain and Procurement an overarching perspective of end-to-end scenarios and processes is especially valuable and supports sustainable improvements.

At this year’s StrategieTage event our special focus lies on our offerings of:

• end-to-end process streamlining - increase strategic contribution of process optimization approaches in highly integrated areas

• value flows - bridging the gap between Finance & Controlling and Business to support a value-driven business transformation

• resilient planning - optimize planning in a sustainable way and enable your planning organization to constantly adapt to changing internal and external requirements

As a common denominator these advisory services are all based on a holistic view on businesses and transformation combined with reference accelerators and field-proven methodology.

We invite all participants to stop-by at our stand or connect to us at another possibility during the event. We are looking forward to inspiring discussions and tangible talks!

If you want to learn more about the event please follow the link to the official "StrategieTage" website.

Planning as part of Business Flows

On September 20th we have launched our latest Business Flows Release. One of the new features has been the End-to-End Domain of Forecast-to-Plan (F2Pl). The new release raised many registrations for the free trial of Business Flows. But is also raised a lot of questions with regards to Forecast-to-Plan. In response to these questions, I am writing this blog and we have updated the F2Pl domain profile on our website.

The nature of planning is less procedural and sequential as many other business domains. And supply chain planning is very industry, company, business unit and even plant or production line specific. In addition, the planning horizon of a planning task impacts detailed activities. These circumstances also influences the character of our Forecast-to-Plan domain. It emphasizes the necessity of integration, interaction and feedback loops to and from the other domains and planning disciplines.

Reference planning landscape - integration into operational domains

The domain is structured in a reference planning landscape for manufacturing industries, which perfectly ties into the existing Business Flows model as both are build on a SCOR-like foundation.

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Five planning disciplines create the heart of our reference landscape and are considered as scenario clusters in the F2Pl domain. These disciplines are: Demand Planning, Distribution Planning, Production Planning, Procurement Planning and Master Planning. The orchestration of these disciplines is key and lies in the responsibility of the Sales and Operations Planning function (S&OP).

The planning disciplines are tightly integrated into the corresponding operational domains. Each domain has a different character which are described in the corresponding domain profiles on our website:

• Procure-to-Pay - P2P

• Plan-to-Produce - Pl2P

• Inbound-to-Outbound - I2O

• Order-to-Cash - O2C

Due to the highly strategic nature of Strategic Network Planning (SNP) we currently do not elaborate on the interconnection with Forecast-to-Plan in more detail. And there are further interfaces that are of interest depending on your specific situation. Just to name some:

• Financial Planning, related to Account-to-Report - A2R

• Marketing Planning, related to Lead-to-Opportunity - L2O

• Project Portfolio Planning, related to Project-to-Decommission - P2D

The orchestration of planning disciplines and integration into operational domains is covered on level 1 and level 2 of our reference process model. These integration points to SNP, A2R, L2O and P2D are considered in the advisory notes of the Business Flows reference model.

Impact of projects and business transformation

Planning is impacted by projects in a different way than by the operational domains. In addition, the effects depend on the kind of project. On the one hand, there are projects in engineer-to-order environments that need to be considered. On the other hand, there are more strategic projects that influence the supply capacities or demand generation and in effect the planning. Such are projects like construction of new production facilities, re-designing the supply setup during network optimization, M&A or carve-outs, R&D product development, launching a new brand or addressing new markets or sales channels.

In the end, all these kind of projects can be summarized as business transformation. And how do you consider ongoing transformation in planning? The answer to this cannot be provided in a reference model. But we are convinced that Planning needs to constantly adapt itself in order to cope with the changing environment. Exactly herein lies the motivation of our Resilient Planning approach. Besides comprehensive and consistent data, and integration into operational domains, the consideration of ongoing transformation is a key challenge in planning.

For more insights, please:

• have a look on the F2Pl domain profile including a commented video introduction

• consider our free trail of Business Flows below

• watch the Resilient Planning video podcast

• or get in touch with me, Stefan Hauenschild, or any of my colleagues

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