Take Your Distribution S&OP to the Next Level
Don’t get complacent! That’s when companies seem to slip, when things get easy to manage – you really should be looking for the next step. Here's how!
Your business is running great! Your customers are happy, you’re making a profit and costs seem under control.
What’s next? Don’t get complacent! That’s when companies seem to slip, when things get easy to manage – you really should be looking for the next step, and the next challenge to up your game over your competition.
How do you become Best in Class? First, you can’t improve without measuring some key performance indicators.
Ask your management team:
- What are you measuring right now and can you verify that the data is valid?
- Are you measuring the right things?
- What is being tracked to determine if a specific process is performing as desired?
Just making process changes without a way to determine if the change produced results may set you back.
This report by the Aberdeen Group points out three critical areas where you must be measuring and tracking performance.
1 – Production & Demand/Supply Metrics – the basics
- Demand Planning (Forecast Accuracy) at the Product Group level
- Demand Planning at the SKU Level
- Supply Performance (% of production achieved)
2 – Customer Service Metrics – end to end, order to delivery times
Do you have data collection in place to measure customer satisfaction with your services, delivery times and responsiveness to requests for support? Getting this data and tracking it will moves your process to the next step beyond just the supply and demand focus.
3 – Process Management – document the plan and refer back to the plan each review cycle
Make certain you record the decisions made and assumptions the plan is based on. Then track and record changes to the plan to prevent the urge to just make subjective changes not based on the plan or the data. Measure, then monitor, then review, discuss and finally make changes to the plan or direction.
Which of these areas are you measuring, reviewing and planning? The best in class mature from just reviewing Production and Demand statistics to including Customer Service and Process Management in their KPI’s.
If you need assistance with data collection and reporting from your Customer Relationship Management system to support improving your KPI’s for Customer Service and Process Management – Contact Socius at 800.614.5589. Our Distribution 2020 team can help improve your systems to collect the data you need then shape it into reports which lead to achieving the next level for your S&OP initiatives.
