For companies that are still at the start, but also for those that are already on the way, we advise you to reflect on your transformation approach taking the following typical challenges into consideration:

• Moving too fast for what the organization can absorb: Transformation requires big efforts of your organization. You need to right-size it to make sure the organization can follow, and you can neatly integrate advanced digital capabilities in your day-to-day operation.
• Moving forward with a suboptimal sequence: It is critical to ensure that there is a balance between processes, digital tools, people capabilities, and data availability and maturity.
• Falling into the trap of a technology push: Rather than trying to force a fit, take the time to properly assess how different digital technologies can best support the dynamics of your business.
• Creating digital silos and black boxes: Advanced planning capabilities have a big potential to create value but also to create new silos you had broken down before. In addition, planner activities need to be well segmented to make sure you don’t fail in adoption because of a black box effect.

Supply Chain Transformation: Doing it the EyeOn way

At EyeOn, we have consolidated our project best practices into guidelines to support you in building sustainable digital planning capabilities and transform your supply chain.

5 focus areas to build sustainable digital planning capabilities

1. Clear direction: As mentioned, before going into execution mode it is essential you define a complete and realistic digital transformation vision and roadmap. Make sure that the long-term development of digital planning capabilities fits neatly with your overall supply chain strategy. Next to that take the time to re-assess your supply chain planning operating model to set clear operating principles that will guide your transformation journey.
2. Foundational capabilities: The success of digital planning applications depends heavily on having good foundational capabilities. That means having well-integrated end-to-end processes, clearly defined and future-proof planning roles, and a master data backbone that supports data-driven planning and advanced analytics.
3. Fit-for-purpose planning tool stack: The tooling landscape is constantly diversifying and offers more and more niche capabilities. With that in mind, you need to assess how different applications, from fast planning solutions, to APS, to systems of innovation, can best serve your needs over time. Also taking into consideration the system integration needs, end-user experience, and capability development requirements.
4. Effective organizational capability building: Digital evolution requires you to re-think your organizational structure (central vs decentral capabilities), planning profiles (digital planning, business IT and data science capabilities) and how to effectively implement these changes in the organization.
5. Smart automation: Using cognitive planning to empower planners to work smarter – automate the obvious, flag where human intervention is required and provide actionable recommendations to planners to improve future planning enrichments.

Co-creating your digital future

Now is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of digitalization and advanced analytics. Digital transformation in essence is a journey rather than a project. It is more about people than technology. Those companies that focus first on changing the mindset as well as the organizational culture and processes are better set for long-term success. With that said, we believe that the best, most lasting solutions are co-created together. Depending on where you are in the journey, we can help you in any of the above domains with our in-depth expertise and hands-on attitude from end to end.

Curious about how EyeOn can help you right-size your digital transformation? Contact our expert Bart Paridaen or visit the end-to-end transformation page on our website for further inspiration.

Explore our trends 2023 page, where we address further supply chain challenges you will be facing this year.

The post Get digital, stay human: Right-sizing your digital supply chain transformation appeared first on EyeOn.

Foundational planning capabilities

To make sure that supply chain transformation initiatives are well aligned with your future supply chain vision, we emphasize the importance of defining an updated supply chain target operating model (TOM) at the very start. A target operating model focuses on translating your strategic principles and vision into a concrete operating model for planning and execution of the end-to-end supply chain. In addition, a TOM outlines the maturity of your supply chain focus areas looking at the axes of processes, organization, data, and tools. It’s the ultimate starting point to refine your foundational planning capabilities to accelerate digital transformation.

Supply chain model: doing it the EyeOn way

At EyeOn, we have consolidated our project best practices into a standard approach to define your supply chain target operating model:

• Scoping and planning principles: A key first step is to go back to your strategic guiding principles (such as visibility, agility, and reliability) and confirm the scope and depth of your model.
• Supply chain mapping: An updated mapping of your supply chain flows (both physical and financial) is crucial to identify bottlenecks and understand planning critical constraints. It is important to map the current state and to visualize the future state.
• Decision mapping: Write down how, where, and when you are forced to make key planning decisions at different horizons and planning levels. Based on a mapping of the decisions, horizons, level of detail, and frequency you can work out an (updated) planning cycle.
• Supply chain control model and organization: As a last step, think about how you are going to organize the decision-making and information flow of your end-to-end supply chain. Determine which activities require a central vs decentral level of control, and what the required planning roles and communication lines are.

Defining a supply chain target operating model sets the base layer of your supply chain planning foundation. From there you can detail the further transformation roadmap to realize step-by-step planning improvement.

Want to know more?

For more information on how we can support you in (re-)designing your foundational planning capabilities please contact one of our planning transformation experts.

The post Supply chain target operating model: The foundation for success appeared first on EyeOn.

More questions about organizational design, capability building, and how to take your organization and employees along the transformation journey? Reach out to our expert Bart Paridaen!

The post Design your future supply chain organization appeared first on EyeOn.

Turn your challenge into an opportunity for future success. Our experts recommend the following steps to accelerate supply chain digitalization and end-to-end transformation of your supply chain:

Start supply chain digitalization from a solid planning foundation

To realize robust end-to-end transformations it is key to start from a solid supply chain foundation. Start by developing an optimal planning model that translates strategy into operational planning principles. Understand the value drivers in your supply chain and define well connected planning processes and a matching organizational setup to facilitate high value planning decisions. Your process re-design needs to be focused on E2E connections, linking the different layers of planning and control of your supply chain through smart alerts.

Focus on high-quality data and planning parameter automation

A holistic planning model and integrated planning process require robust and well-integrated data structures to drive execution. A well-defined data model and supportive governance processes across your IT landscape are vital to secure setup, maintenance, and right-sizing of your planning parameters. It all starts with having a complete, accurate, and well-aligned master data fundament. Building on this solid baseline you can have the data work for you to build a process for smart-touch automation of your critical planning parameters. As your supply chain develops you can real time update your vital parameters to improve overall planning accuracy.

The full value of advanced planning solutions

A new generation of planning systems promise embedded cognitive automation to make real-time recommendations, predict outcomes, and take timely supply chain decisions. It is crucial that your functional design supports the E2E planning process, connects well to your enterprise-wide data model and allows progressive digital innovations (such as AI and advanced analytics). To realize the full value of your APS (advanced planning and scheduling) system you need to build the right in-house capabilities. Your planners require the right data processing, analytical, and data science skills to operationalize and embed digitalization into the day-to-day planning routine.

Building a digital ecosystem

If you are ready for the next step, look beyond traditional planning systems and investigate how systems of innovation can help to boost planning capabilities in a digital ecosystem. Data science platforms like Dataiku can bring advanced analytics capabilities in-house quickly and can be plugged into the systems that are already in place, like ERPs (enterprise resource planning), APSs, or data lakes. These systems of innovation allow data scientists to make the most out of their expertise, allow for easy collaboration between them and the business, and enable you to go from prototype to production quickly but robustly. Building an ecosystem of digital capabilities will help your organization to accelerate the digital transformation through the implementation of focused innovations.

We are here to support you in your supply chain digitalization journey!

Are you looking for ways to accelerate the digitalization of your E2E supply chain planning process and are you in need of the right expertise and hands-on support to make it happen? We are here to help you in this journey. Together we transform, automate, and optimize. Learn more about E2E transformations or contact us now!

This is the time to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, maximizing the benefits of digitalization and advanced analytics.

The post Accelerate the digitalization of your supply chain appeared first on EyeOn.

Read more in the Supply Chain Magazine’s trend interview (in Dutch) with EyeOn Managing Partner and Senior Consultant André Vriens.

This article might also interest you
How to plan in a post-pandemic world: Five key focal areas in 2021

The post Seize opportunities with the help of digital transformation appeared first on EyeOn.

New technologies offer the opportunity to accomplish a more data driven supply chain. This made companies rethink their business planning processes. In this webinar we shared our vision on how to embark on the digital transformation journey and how to take the momentum of the Covid situation to take action.  

This webinar is part of the ‘Accelerate the digital transformation’ webinar series in which we touch upon the different building blocks of end-to-end supply chain transformation, with a webinar on the EyeOn approach regarding this topic, the next-generation IBP, and tool selection.  Also we will review a number of the current APS solutions on the market. Check out our upcoming events.

The post Webinar ‘Accelerate the digital transformation – Introduction’ appeared first on EyeOn.

1. Re-instate statistical forecasting

The key assumption for statistical forecasting that “the past is a good predictor for the future” doesn’t hold anymore, which presents a new challenge in forecasting and demand management: Can we still generate a meaningful statistical forecast in our planning system, if past demand patterns are heavily disrupted? The answer is yes, and here are two methods how: 

Tetris correction  

This technique consciously fills plummeted sales gaps in the disrupted period to recover the demand pattern. It can also be used in case sales peaked exceptionally. However, the resulting statistical forecast might not be fully usable if it is expected that demand will again behave in a disrupted way in the future. To still generate a proper baseline in this case, that only needs limited manual enrichment, another method is available in our toolkit:  

The Rubber Duck 

This method applies future ‘disruption and recovery curves’ on the right aggregation level (e.g. country-product family), to reflect expected demand disruption throughout the selected portfolio scope. 

2. Optimize your working capital

Companies today are facing tremendous inventory challenges, balancing between controlling the stocks and maintaining their customer service levels; demand patterns have changed both up and down; inventory levels were based on the past stable situation. It is vitally important to bring focus and create a plan to cope with the challenges. What can you as a company do first to get the fast-working results without costly long-time efforts? 

The answer is simple – create insights in your main inventory, service level, and cost drivers. It is impossible to optimize your parameters without knowing the as-is situation. Use the insights to define the most effective prevention and counter measures. As a next step, restore supply chain balance and enhance the quick wins with smart analytics. Only then start regularly updating your inventory parameters based on the latest trends in demand and supply, leveraging the knowledge of the planners. Monitor the progress and the results to keep your settings optimized for the future.

3. Use your IBP process to manage the dynamics

Current business reality has taught us that being able to deal with dynamics is pivotal to be successful. A well-functioning IBP process is critical to reducing the latency in responding to events happening in the market and allows you to make high-quality decisions. IBP is a cross-functional business process involving finance, sales, marketing, and supply chain. Situations change fast. Grab new opportunities and have an agile response to the unexpected.   

Bring your IBP process to its full potential and keep evolving in line with business needs. How to get started:  

1. Assess & benchmark your current maturity 
2. Design & implement a fit for purpose IBP process 
3. Coach stakeholders on various levels in the organization 

4. Re-design your supply chain

Global supply chains with single sourcing have become a common set-up for competitive reasons over the last decades for many companies. Three main forces drive reconsideration of this set-up and the need to re-assess your supply chain configuration:  

1. The Covid crisis, with lockdowns, the closing of markets shows the vulnerability of global set-ups.
2. The growing politicization and uncertainty in free trade require more resilient supply chains.
3. The need to consider the environmental impact of the current supply chains. In the circular economy, shorter supply chains with integrated return flows are more sustainable.

Supply chain redesign starts with translating the business strategy into supply chain requirements. Consider building a digital model of the as-is supply chain (“digital twin”). This can be used for the optimization and evaluation of scenarios on various criteria like costs, service, environmental impact, and risks. Uncertainty asks for more frequent evaluation of the supply chain configuration. Leverage the developed digital supply chain model and build your capability. 

5. Accelerate the digital transformation

Digital technologies have changed our personal lives via WhatsApp, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, and Spotify. This change has also a large impact on your value chain. Considerable investments are being made to enable the digital transformation in the planning domain, companies are taking big steps towards increasing the level of automation of their planning processes. Getting digital holds the promise of efficiency of tasks that once required substantial time and human effort. It also involves improving the quality of forecasts, plans, and decisions through mining large amounts of data to discover new insights that were previously inaccessible.   

Advancements need to be made in collecting and engineering data, implementing new tools that allow for more advanced analytics, preparing your organization, and building a data-driven culture. Start with developing a vision, select a business process to work on, and take it from there by running projects to explore benefits and learn data science tools that go beyond the existing planning tools, build capabilities, KPIs and data. 

Readjust your planning and forecasting to a post-pandemic world, start by getting in touch with our experts! 

What about the supply chain challenges in 2022? We got you covered!

The post How to plan in a post-pandemic world: Five key focal areas in 2021 appeared first on EyeOn.

Companies need to advance data collection by building a digital twin, implement new tools that allow for more advanced analytics, prepare your organisation and build a data driven culture.

Undeniably, analytics is changing forecasting and supply planning processes – but quite some water has to pass under the bridge before companies will get to full no-touch planning. Start with developing a vision, select a business process to work on and take it from there by running projects to explore benefits and get acquainted with data science tools that go beyond the existing planning tools, build capabilities, KPIs and data.

If you want to know more about supply chain planning and forecasting in the digital age, read our white paper! Or get in contact with Freek Aertsen. 

The post Getting digital, go human! appeared first on EyeOn.

1. Help everyone understand the current situation

A highly capable employee experiences friction if the technology he has, does not fit the current processes or data. The employee is then likely to create a solution in Excel to bridge the gap. This principle is exactly what we have discussed in Part 1 of Excel hell: Friction is caused by differences in the capability in one or more of the four pillars (people, processes, technology and data). As many companies have experienced; running core processes in Excel involves large risks and limitations. To reduce the dependency on Excel, you and your team have to understand in each situation which pillar is less capable than the others. 

When you try to push one of the pillars to a higher level of capability relative to the others, you introduce friction and people find a way to bridge the gap in Excel. Upgrading one of the pillars, e.g. hiring an expert or buying an advanced system, will not deliver desired results if the other pillars are not on a similar level. Within this article we will divide each pillar in three ‘levels’; basic, intermediate and advanced. We use this to give a frame of reference on how rate the organisations current level for the respective pillar.   

As change is a given, the level of capability of each of the pillars will be under constant pressure. You can make big steps in improving capability with a project but keeping the pillars on the same height requires ongoing effort from within the team. The rest of this article explains what the different levels of capability in each of the four pillars mean, to ease understanding where gaps exist.

‘ As change is a given, the level of capability of each of the pillars will be under constant pressure.‘

2. Build or hire people capability to design good processes and tools 

Balancing out the pillars people, process, technology and data, needs to start with the people part. Begin by making sure you have the right skills in your team who can deal with the change that comes with moving away from the current way of working.

The people who see the most added value in moving away from Excel hell, are likely the same people who currently suffer from it. They are the ones who currently complain about amending/fixing/extending and working with the Excel files daily. They are already at a basic level – the ability to do the operational tasks required. Ideally, some of these people are interested in growing their skills in working with data and can be taught how to grow out of the Excel hell. In other cases, more tech-savvy talent needs to be attracted to ensure the organization can grow their people pillar.

Once you have chosen the technological process that suits your business best, your people need to be formally trained to work with it. Growing skills in how to maintain data and develop software in a perpetual way within that process is essential in order to move to an intermediate level. Next, train them in working with modern software specifically aimed at the task at hand. Either support the current Excel solution or replace it altogether. Do not try to put people into a role that does not suit them, rather hire people with dedicated skills that will help the team grow. We advise caution: hiring someone overqualified can to lead to more friction if they are not able to spread the knowledge with the team. 

Growing the people pillar, requires allowing people to dedicate time within their schedules to improve their skill set. Make sure the training is formal with experienced trainers. When training on the job, make sure they are mixed in with more experienced end users to keep the learning curve in an upward trajectory. To have the team reach an advanced level set them up in flexible teams, allowing for effective teamwork and precise execution.

3. Make sure there is a permanent process for improvement

When coming out of Excel hell it is easy for old habits to revive (read: people start creating uncontrolled Excels again), especially when under pressure. To prevent this you need a process in place that controls the creation and maintenance of functionalities. 

Senior management has an important role in this. If you keep asking ad-hoc reports that need to be produced yesterday, without a proper tool and process in place, the quick and dirty way is to create a new Excel. And once part of the reporting deck, it stays there. Creating Excel’s should be the exception rather than the rule. Adopt a design principle “Not Excel, unless…”  

“Not Excel, unless…”  

This lever of process control is not the same in each situation. Too little control is ineffective and too much is inefficient. The three levels of the process pillar are: 

Basic for local processes, non-integrated processes. One person uses a tool that is not used for interacting with other functions nor for consolidation. This still needs some control, for example a convention for documenting. You can still have an issue if someone created a solution a month ago and now must repeat it but cannot completely retrack his/her line of thinking. Even here an uncontrolled Excel is not future proof. 

Intermediate for local x-functional processes or reports used for consolidation into other reports. This needs more control. The output of this process step or report is input to other(s) that need to be able to process it. This is easier controlled if both are in the same technical environment with centrally controlled master data and agreed upon conventions for creation and maintenance. Period x-functional review of the framework and if these still support the decision-making process is best practice. 

Advanced for x-functional global processes. Different regions or business units may have different needs because the underlying business drivers are different. As there can be a lot of interaction between functions, or different consolidation layers you need to define what needs to be the “common core” and where, for example, business units or regions can add their specifics and to what extent. This requires a coordinated approach both on central and decentral level and a structured periodic review. A shared vision, road map and associated goals and budget help giving direction. An advanced process is run well by dedicated professionals, supported by a mature tool and fed by high quality data. 

4.  Data needs more attention than you might think

People have started to realize that data is one of the most important assets a company has. The need for high quality data has increased for every job in any company. High quality data can streamline operations, provide a basis for tactical planning and supports strategic decisions. Unfortunately, maintaining high quality data has become increasingly more difficult due to the complexity of many companies.

Basic data that any company has, is operational data. Data types are for example order data, customer data, supplier data and invoice data. Without this information the company cannot do anything. This data is not necessarily well documented; many companies do not keep track of cancelled orders, have plenty of old non-existing customers and one product might exist with many different codes or names. Issues with basic data capability usually occur in cross functional processes or with new initiatives. These processes or initiatives often become dependent on Excel workbooks which are not properly connected to other business processes.

Companies with an intermediate data capability have structured what data they have and how they store it. They realize that different business units have different names and hierarchies and can link most of the data in a data warehouse. This is impossible to achieve if a large part of your data is stored in Excel. Cross functional processes run smoothly with an occasional hick-up and manual update. Intermediate data capability is a good basis for tactical planning, however new initiatives are still difficult to implement due to the complex data structure.

Advanced data capability can only be achieved by making it a priority for every system user, including management. Data hierarchies need to be defined centrally and the importance of proper maintenance must be understood by every employee. To reach this level of data capability, a company needs to have a very strong data storage solution that is easily accessible and interacts with all other systems. High data capability allows the company to have both an overview of, and a detailed insight into, every part of the business. 

5. Get a flexible system that allows you to grow

Excel is one of the more basic tools that can support your business, if the other pillars are also on a basic level. Many small companies or disconnected processes can work just fine by using Excel spreadsheets to monitor, analyse, and communicate without experiencing friction. It allows employees to experiment and to learn and it can quickly be adapted for process and data changes. The tremendous amount of flexibility helps employees bridge the gaps between the pillars. However, Excel is poor at connecting processes, processing large amounts of data and delivering stable high-quality results.

On the other end of the scale, the high capability technology, are tools specifically developed for a certain process. These tools are developed with much care by experts in the field and these experts have thought about the best theoretical practice to solve business challenges. The main downside of these products is that they require that the company is ready to implement best practices across multiple teams. They require the users, the data, and the processes to be able to live up to these high standards. Moreover, not all processes are generic enough for these high capability tools; the best practice for that process does not exist yet in any tool. In these situations, a high capability tool is not the best solution even if the other pillars are very capable. Implementing an advanced tool in an environment that is not ready for it will result in either high modification, a failure in implementation, or a lot of friction after go-live.

In order to grow from basic to advanced, a step in between is required. The right tool is flexible to support the growth of the other pillars and at the same time diminishes the problems of Excel. This tool should work in low capability environments like Excel does, but also work for the high capability user with advanced x-functional global processes and high volumes of data. It should also be able to support edge cases, where advanced tools do not offer any solution out of the box. The next part of this trilogy will be about what the right tool looks like.

The post How to get out of Excel hell appeared first on EyeOn.

Read here the article (in Dutch)

The post Keep control during a hurricane appeared first on EyeOn.