Anaplan is a leading provider of enterprise cloud software, empowering organizations across industries to see, plan, and lead better business outcomes. For supply chain management, the Anaplan platform enables supply chain professionals to see clearly, plan confidently, and lead decisively across their organization with the power of their Connected Planning platform.

The new Anaplan Partner Accelerate Program

Anaplan recently introduced the Anaplan Partner Accelerate Program, a revamped supplier initiative designed to acknowledge a supplier’s level of Anaplan support and industry-specific expertise. This innovative program incorporates an audit of each supplier, evaluating the industries they serve, and the extent of Anaplan support they can offer. Partners can receive badges for either delivery, signifying expertise in implementing Anaplan effectively for clients, or advisory, indicating proficiency in providing Anaplan consulting services. 

Dual badges for industry-specific expertise

In August of last year, we underwent an audit conducted by an external auditor. This comprehensive evaluation covered our methodologies, industry approach, and adherence to best practices. Through the presentation of real-life use cases showcasing our successful implementation and advisory services across various industries, we affirmed the quality of our work as an Anaplan partner. 

The auditor, based on the evidence presented, rewarded us with both the delivery and advisory badges, with a specific emphasis on the consumer products and manufacturing industries. The auditor’s conclusion highlighted our profound understanding of industry needs and our capability to provide tailored solutions for each sector.

EyeOn and Anaplan: what’s next? 

At EyeOn, we are delighted to have received this new badge, as it serves as tangible evidence of EyeOn’s status as a reliable Anaplan partner capable of effectively assisting companies in optimizing their planning processes with Anaplan. While we have already supported numerous clients in Anaplan implementations, our future objective is to support even more companies with their unique planning challenges and help them transition to an advanced planning tool that accelerates their journey towards supply chain excellence.

Many companies continue to grapple with end-to-end visibility, resulting in a lack of data quality essential for informed decision-making. Anaplan proves to be a powerful tool, facilitating easy access to accurate data in a timely manner, ultimately reducing manual efforts and enhancing overall supply chain visibility.

Ready to boost your planning performance?

If you are embarking on an Advanced Planning System (APS) transformation journey and seek an objective assessment of your organization’s readiness, EyeOn is here to help. Our team of Anaplan specialists possesses the expertise, experience, and hands-on mentality to design and operationalize your planning system, ultimately boosting its performance.  

Get directly in touch with our Anaplan Lead Bram Kurstjens to discuss your specific challenges and transform them into opportunities for growth. Or request a personalized Anaplan demo and we will get in touch with you shortly to plan a meeting. 

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Explore our website to learn more or contact our experts!

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Balancing demand and supply is a challenge for many companies which even in relatively stable times may necessitate working with different scenarios. COVID-19-related issues and geopolitical turbulences in Europe and Asia put even more pressure on organizations to develop or further mature scenario modeling capabilities. When taking on this challenge, three angles should be considered:

• Monetizing the scenarios
• Embedding the scenarios in your S&OP/IBP process
• Using the proper tools

Financialize your decisions

When you want to move to scenario modeling you need to be able to assess the trade-offs between the different scenarios. Making them financial makes comparison possible.

Make use of the different operational plans that are already being created in your organization. Plans like the marketing plan, sales plan, supply plan, or factory plan contain key drivers that function as leading indicators. Market growth or share, price positioning, order book, installed base, or sales volume can be key drivers impacting your net sales. Factory cost price, manufacturing efficiency, freight, and handling costs can be leading indicators that impact your cost of goods sold. Moving down the profit and loss account below ‘integral gross margin’, you will also be able to find key value drivers in existing operation plans.

Demand fluctuations are the driving force behind projections on revenue and variable costs. A proper tool allows you to create business rules that help you relate fluctuations in demand to effects on profit and loss, balance sheets, and cash flow items. You will need to identify more drivers and create more business rules to complete the picture. But playing with simple demand scenarios (like ‘low’, ‘most likely’, and ‘high’) is often the starting point because it usually has a big influence on multiple line items. Once you have created the model, you can run it multiple times playing with the drivers, and easily compare different scenarios.

Upgrade your S&OP/IBP process with supply chain scenario planning

The key is to (re-)design your process so you periodically take a snapshot of your operational systems which, using a set of predefined business rules, can function as a starting point for making monetized S&OP/IBP plans.

To be able to create these monetized plans you need (more) involvement of the finance or control department in your S&OP/IBP process. Controllers become partners in business, no longer only explaining what happened but helping the organization to anticipate on what is likely going to happen, moving from being primarily reactive to becoming more proactive – the objective of supply chain scenario planning.

Because of its nature of crossing functional borders, the S&OP/IBP process is the most logical place to house supply chain scenario planning capabilities. Organizations that have a proper S&OP/IBP process in place typically create several scenarios where they play with the drivers that determine the success of the organization. They play with volume, price, quality, and mix of the raw materials used and products sold and, for example, the allocation of quantities to different factories. This results in gradually getting a feeling for what is really important, where the risks and opportunities are. Continuous integrated demand and supply alignment, supported by dedicated supply chain scenario planning, is an effective way to evaluate risks in a structured way and determine mitigating actions.

Consider a fast planning tool to support

To effectively and efficiently build scenarios and play with these during the S&OP/IBP process you need a tool that allows you to do so. We see different levels of tool support:

Most immature are often homegrown systems to support specific planning tasks and are basically structured Excel with macros and automated up and downloads. They can be cheap, fast, and provide a close to the user experience, but become slower with increased amounts of data to process, difficult to maintain, labor-intensive (making them less cheap in the end), and error-prone.

On the other side of the tooling landscape, we see advanced planning systems. These are integrated planning systems supporting and optimizing various planning processes like demand planning, production planning, and S&OP from vendors like SAP, Infor, JDA, OMP, Kinaxis, and O9. These have rich functionality, but are complex, expensive, and require IT for implementation. They are considered a long-term solution covering a wide array of planning capabilities.

If you don’t want to build something in Excel because of its drawbacks, but also don’t want the complexity of an advanced planning system, there is an alternative combining the best of both worlds: fast planning tools. A flexible platform that allows to build apps to support specific planning processes. Examples are Anaplan, Jedox, and Board. They provide scalable functionality and are cloud-based. Fast planning tools feel like ‘structured Excel’ and allow a business-driven implementation, without heavy IT involvement and at relatively low investment costs. They bring scenario modeling, design, and implementation close to the end-user, allowing rapid implementation, and changes to the model can also be realized quickly.

How we can support you in optimizing your supply chain scenario planning

We hope this article gives you a good base to start building and playing with scenarios. If you want to know more check out our content on S&OP/IBP and planning solutions!

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

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We were happy to meet attendees from more than 50 multinationals live in Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and Ireland and virtually in the Netherlands. A big thank you to our guest speakers from Henkel Laundry & Home Care: Ariane Longpré, Director Planning/IBP Program Lead and Jorden Rasquin, Head of International Planning Steering, and Filip Buytaert, Global IBP & Supply Chain Director at AkzoNobel!

E2E supply chain transformation
Since Covid-19 and the incident at the Suez Canal it has become clear that companies need to transform their E2E value chain and build robust & connected digital processes. Key take away from the discussions was that having a good understanding of the strategy and the impact of the supply chain model is essential. This might very well require a differentiated approach. It is crucial to take your organization along in defining the supply chain model that connects well to your strategy. Don’t wait for an ‘ideal moment of readiness’. Start now!
We have more content on transforming your E2E supply chain coming in December – stay tuned!
In the meantime you can read more on end-to-end planning transformation.

IBP
A key step to enable agility and drive business performance is transforming your sales & operations planning (S&OP) to integrated business planning (IBP).
1. Position IBP as a cross-functional business process to drive growth
2. Be creative in finding the way in; tune in to business context, tune it to your strategy
3. Think big, start small, scale fast
Learn more about IBP.

Fast planning
Which keywords do supply chain leaders expect to be important for the supply chain 2030? Digitization and agility/flexibility play a big role. As part of their transformation journey, companies are challenged to integrate new technologies and implement fast. Flexible solutions like Anaplan or Jedox connect data, people and plans in a solution that does not require coding and can be implemented quickly.

About half of Planning Inspiration Days attendees are not using machine learning or artificial intelligence yet, 50% are making first steps in forecasting and demand planning.

Data Science

Data is all around us. The amount of information in the world is growing exponentially, and it becomes outdated much more rapidly than it did before. Our brains are not built to effectively deal with such large volumes of information. Latency is becoming an ever bigger issue in decision making: When an event occurs, we need to prepare data for analysis and deliver it to the right stakeholder, so they can decide which action to take. Every minute lost in this process reduces the impact of the eventual decision.
Data and the role of data science within the supply chain are differentiators. Think beyond traditional planning systems and dare to invest in ‘systems of innovation’ to utilize the power of data and enhance existing planning systems. At EyeOn we see the future in smart-touch planning: With better technology we enable you to take faster decisions, thereby increasing the impact.

How does it work? Smart-touch planning automates obvious decisions, it makes recommendations where additional information is available, and flags special cases where human intervention is necessary.
Read more about smart-touch planning.

Learn how Planning Services can support you to take advantage of advanced analytics instantly, plugged-in to your current APS and ERP tools!

Find out how you can make better forecasts using advanced technologies! 

Check out our video on driver-based forecasting! 

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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.

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The first thing that anyone needs to understand when they want to get rid of Excel, is that Excel is a solution, not a problem. Someone has made the Excel workbook to address a problem that could not be solved with the current system landscape offered by IT. This could be triggered by employees that do not know their way around the current system, even though the system is perfectly able to do it. It could be a new process which the current system simply isn’t ready for. It could be that the data in the current systems is incorrect but correcting it in those systems takes too much time/effort.

It all boils down to people, processes, data, and technology. These areas are well known by most consultants and there are many ways of displaying the image below, but as this article has a focus on technology, we display it with technology up front.

Imagine the size of each pillar is determined by the level of capability. The pillars need to be “the same size” to maintain a stable platform and avoid unnecessary workarounds. The level of capability of one of the four areas must match the capability of the other areas. If not, the user experiences friction and will try to use a powerful end-user tool like Excel to reduce that friction. Below are some examples of what happens when the capability of one area is bigger than the others:

So why does Excel succeed where other technologies fail? It is because the (experienced) user can create new functionality, instantly. The functionality will always fit the user requirements, the user can incrementally increase functionality according to his proficiency, the solution can be adjusted for process changes and the data being used is easily decided by the user. Because the user is in full control; the technology is always on the same level as the processes, the people, and the data.

That sounds quite good right? Then why do companies hate Excel? The biggest problem is the lack of a single common source of truth. People tend to have different numbers for the same thing, which leaves them to discuss the value instead of the story behind the value. It will keep people from making decisions or worse, making the wrong decision. There are many reasons why this issue and others arise; We won’t dedicate an entire article on them, as you probably know most of them already. We simply mention them and if you have questions, you can reach us.

• Ownership: Excel workbooks are usually owned by 1 person, who you then fully rely on.
• Reliability: Excel can become overly complex, decreasing transparency and reliability. They are often used in production without proper testing so bugs may persist for a long time.
• Accessibility: Multiple users in one Excel workbook remains problematic.
• Maintainability: Excel workbooks are seldom well documented. Version management is often neglected.
• Processing: Excel depends on the computer of the user to process all the data.
• Automation: Possible via VBA but requires more knowledge and adds complexity.
• Stability: Complex or big Excel workbooks tend to become unstable.

Compared to dedicated systems, the above issues are a heavy cost for the flexibility Excel has to offer. The next blog post, part 2, explains the pillars in more detail and why they are important! Part 3 will focus on tools to use instead, without losing the flexibility desperately needed by most companies.

We thank Flatland for designing the image to fit this story.

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Advanced Planning Solution vendors are fueling this fear by promoting next generation tools as the solution. Next to the traditional Advanced Planning Solution vendors, ‘new kids on the block’ are emerging, making it even more difficult to make a choice. Besides, only few companies already have a clear view on how advanced analytics could give them a competitive advantage.

Bridge the gap to next level planning with advanced planning solutions

The good news is that companies can buy time, while getting access to the latest advanced analytics capabilities. Bridge the gap to next level planning instantly, by plugging-in proven ‘systems of innovation’ into your current APS and/or ERP system. Typical analytics that can be tapped into are advanced forecasting, inventory optimization, or supply chain data engineering (data mining to e.g. determine realistic lead times).

By connecting to this kind of managed services, planning performance gets an instant boost. It enables planners and the organization to get acquainted with next level planning capabilities. And delivers insights to specific future planning needs, to shape their future planning landscape at their own pace.

Learn more about our Planning Services! 

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