A leading multinational beverage company embarked on a journey to develop a connected sales & operations planning solution on Anaplan. It aimed at enforcing process agility, improving forecast accuracy, and having better visibility of its brands across the S&OP cycle. Siddhant Parnaik of 91���� explains how S&OP solution helps with accurate forecasting to achieve business goals

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is the link between enterprise-wide business strategy and daily operations. It is also the underlying function that lowers lead times, determines customer satisfaction, impacts inventory costs, and plays a critical role in driving supply chain efficiency. In turn, it requires cross-functional communication and collaboration between sales, marketing, procurement, finance, and operations to accurately balance supply and demand.
A good S&OP approach provides decisions to calibrate production, meets short-term market demand and achieves financial objectives. Typically, say a CPG business, will sit down once a month or once a quarter to chalk out its sales and operations plan. A manual spreadsheet, even today, is the most used tool for the task. It should be evident to even novice planners that using a manual spreadsheet for this complex task is ladened with risks. S&OP has many moving parts and is riddled with ambiguities – only a sophisticated solution driven by technology can provide results that a business can use with confidence.

One of 91����’s customers, a leading global beverage manufacturer, understood the perils of using traditional and outdated S&OP tools. It was struggling to integrate data from large spreadsheets used by various teams involved in the S&OP process. Incorrect data, issues in extracting the latest data from core systems, the data in the wrong location in spreadsheets, were causing endless issues. The most significant issue was delay of up to three weeks in critical decisions related to production. In the absence of scenario-planning, executive decisions almost always missed the mark.

Most organizations that are using formal S&OP processes find that sales and operations rarely arrive at a consensus on demand. This leads to excess or obsolete inventory, lost sales and upset customers. The key cause of this is conflicting data.

The solution is to connect the functional teams and their systems on a single secure cloud-based platform capable of pulling live data into the S&OP process. For the beverage client, 91���� customized a solution on Anaplan, enabling collaborative demand planning based on the latest sales inputs and facilitating demand allocation to plants. Using the solution, the team could easily balance demand and supply taking into consideration its capacity constraints. The platform is designed to recalculate output in real-time, and any change becomes available across stakeholders.

The new system enabled scenario planning for the client. Now, “what if” scenarios can be created, shared and compared, new products and suppliers can be added, assumptions can be made without tedious data collection and verification. Overall, it is easier to review plans and scenarios, build consensus and sign off on a plan. The final production plan is integrated with SAP for accurately managing the scheduling function.

The easy-to-use solution resulted in eliminating data silos for the beverage client. Sales forecast improved by 30 percent, and S&OP cycle time was reduced by 60 percent. In addition, the client improved customer service levels, fill-rates, and brewery capacity utilization.

These are gains that any business can access through a well-considered and customized implementation of a modern S&OP platform. Now, there are scores of businesses that continue to use spreadsheets. Organizations that choose a stable and reliable technological approach are bound to benefit from agile planning and the differentiator it creates. It is clear to see that as using technology for business functions grows, S&OP must become a priority area for investments.

Author:

Siddhant Parnaik
Senior Associate Consultant, Digital Experience
91����

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Digital commerce is a sophisticated practice with long-term financial impact on capex and opex – this makes it necessary for digital commerce managers to upskill and be ready to lead their organizations into the future.

Digital commerce

Today, digital commerce brings a set of exciting technologies into play. The key areas that need attention include real-time data management, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), which have become central to interpreting supply and demand signals. Studies show that by 2023, most organizations using AI for digital commerce will achieve at least a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction, revenue or cost reduction. This makes the criteria for choosing a suitable e-commerce platform extremely important. For most organizations, the safe path is to partner an IT provider with the required domain experience to evaluate platforms, match them to the digital maturity of the organization and complete the implementation.

Assess digital maturity and select platform based on business needs, features & capabilities

At 91����, we measure digital maturity through organizational priorities, implementation of customer-facing initiatives and the intention of management to adopt digital practices over time.

Next comes the task of defining platform features and customization capabilities to meet unique business needs, from payments to SKU management and from workflow to processing refunds. Let’s examine the top 10 criteria for assessing a platform:

1. Functionality: The uniqueness of the e-commerce store, its target market, nature of the product catalog, geo and the need for international sales along with currency, language, tax requirements, expected traffic, etc., determines functionality.

2. Hosting: E-commerce platform hosting comes in various flavors, from pure SaaS to fully managed cloud hosted. This is an important component of infrastructure that ensures availability, cost and provides the desired level of scalability and security. SaaS is the best option for stores that need limited features and where upfront cost savings are a major requirement.

3. Licensing/Cost: The licensing and set up costs of an e-commerce store include platform licenses, software/subscriptions, cloud servers, IT staff, designers, marketing and promotions and taxes. These costs can quickly add up and impact ROI. Therefore, meticulous planning needs to be put behind these aspects.

4. Customizations: Customization of page templates should be easy, using standardized plug ins to save costs and time, and should be aimed at increasing traffic to the store.

5. Integrations: The e-commerce store should seamlessly integrate with ERP, Order Management Systems, CRM, Payment Gateways, Logistics Management, Product Information Management, etc.

6. Internationalization: For global operations, stores should support multi-lingual and multi-currency capabilities, multi-payment gateway configurations, custom tax rules, and custom shipping integrations.

7. Mobile Commerce: With the growth in smart phones, mobile commerce has become extremely popular. Businesses must therefore focus on providing mobile commerce support for iOS and Android platforms.

8. AR/VR and ML: According to reports, as many as 78.65% shoppers abandon their carts before completing a purchase.��Emerging technologies like AR and VR increase customer engagement and improve conversion rates. Businesses would want to use AR/VR for improving awareness, saving costs, allowing customers to simulate real life scenarios (such as trying on eye wear or a jacket or seeing how furniture looks in the living room) and reaching better decisions. Similarly, Machine Learning (ML) and analytics should be used for Customer Segmentation, Personalization, and Targeted Campaigns to convert prospects into buyers, to optimize pricing, prevent fraud, and improve product recommendations.

9. Security: E-commerce stores should use the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI/DSS) to collect and store credit card information. The PCI/DSS is an industry standard and is designed to keep customer information secure and the business protected from reputational damage resulting from compromised card data. In addition, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) should stay protected in order to meet privacy regulations like General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR).

10. BI Analytics/Reporting: The capabilities of analytics and reporting tools plays an important role in analyzing e-commerce trends such as popular products, most searched products, etc., and creating insights into customer behavior.

91����’s unique capabilities for digital commerce solutions

91����’s Digital Commerce practice has the expertise to implement innovative, intuitive and collaborative digital commerce solutions while staying focused on the top 10 criteria for platform selection across retail, travel and hospitality, healthcare, consumer goods, and fashion. Our design thinking capabilities around e-commerce solutions have set new benchmarks. Clients who have used our expertise have also managed to take advantage of support and continuous development options – both being critical to ongoing e-commerce success.

To know more, check out the whitepaper on ‘’.

Author:

Nazeer Akbar Hussain,
Solution Architect, Customer Experience

Reference:

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