Benefits
for the Board of Directors
In representing owners to management, the board can use FD6
to view the company from different aggregate points of view
(SBU, markets, product families) and drill down to supporting
detail, including events, assumptions, and key measures of
performance to better understand and evaluate the aggregate
business expectations they receive from management.
Benefits for the
Chief Executive Officer
With FD6 the CEO can optimize company definition and strategy
for maximum return. Markets, product families and organized
key performance indicators add up to company definition. FD6
provides for freely and accurately defining these and therefore
the company as a whole within its framework. Within this framework,
scenarios (what-ifs) can be defined and evaluated and strategy
can be optimized. Since projected financial statements are
part of FD6, FD6 can turn scenarios into projected financial
statements (pro-formas) for bottom line business evaluation.
The CEO can manage strategic performance
via customized key performance indicators in a balanced scorecard,
which is built into FD6. FD6 provides for evaluating which
key performance indicators are relevant to profits and potential
for the enterprise as a whole and by channels, product families,
markets, geography, departments, etc. They also measure how
investment should be allocated to optimize performance.
Senior management can build scenarios that
include the competition by modeling the competition in terms
of comparative key performance indicators. Doing this modeling
helps position and calibrate the enterprise and indicates
positioning improvement opportunities. This clarity helps
in evaluating mergers and acquisitions.
Improving the company's ability to anticipate
and position itself means improving a company's smarts, and
this is a strategic advantage in and of itself.
The effect of implementing sales and operations
planning together with demand planning as an integrated business
process is that management spends less time reacting and more
time managing proactively and managing opportunities instead
of fighting fires. This change results in market share increase,
another strategic advantage.
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Benefits for the
President
FD6 provides comprehensive visibility and control at all important
levels of detail -- company totals, market, product family,
and SBU aggregates, product, customer and sales rep details.
FD6 provides an excellent information framework in which to
figure out how to make and exceed performance expectations:
where sales can be increased, costs can be reduced, performance
can be improved, bad assumptions can be corrected, growth
opportunities can be seized.
FD6 provides the President with on-going
real-time key performance indicators (of his design) to monitor
performance and indicate where his time and attention are
most importantly and urgently needed.
FD6 provides graphical charts on how the
company is doing relative to budget and to stretch goals.
As the President sees that channels, markets, and product
families are above or below budget and/or stretch goal, he
can use FD6's drill-down and pareto sorting capabilities through
successive levels of detail to find the territories, products
and customers most responsible for divergences from expectation.
Since rationales are attached to expectations FD6 provides
for quick understanding and corrective or opportunistic action.
FD6's key performance indicators synchronize
business operations with company strategy.
Having an integrated demand planning and
sales and operations planning process in place ensures that
deputy managers are proactively and cohesively rebalancing
looming out of balance conditions, and therefore spending
less time reacting to problems and more time managing opportunities
and increasing market share. Also, as managers are proactively
and cohesively solving problems, they are doing much less
blaming; teamwork is better, team spirit is better, the company
is a better place to work and can attract better people.
Collaborative planning with customers and
suppliers means stronger ties, greater visibility, and productivity
and efficiency gains from better resource alignments.
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Benefits for the
Chief Financial Officer
FD6 provides financial projections and detailed projected
financial statements (pro-formas) to facilitate managing the
company's P&Ls. As demand and supply decisions are made
and expectations therefore change the CFO can see these changes
numerically and graphically in FD6's user-interface, FD's
reports, or exported to EXCEL.
As accuracy increases financial expectations
become more and more reliable.
Company projected financials can be broken
down by SBU/division, product family, market, channel, etc.
FD6's financial reporting capability provides
for checking for financial surprises before they become problems.
FD6 provides for proactive gap analyses.
FD6 provides for integrated visibility
and control of lots of standard items like: cost of goods
sold, days of inventory, backlog days, fixed asset utilization,
revenue growth, SGA, order to invoice lead time, customer
inventory, distribution inventory, etc.)
FD6 provides for consistent and integrated
financial reporting consistency, and thereby helps with Sarbanes
Oxley matters. FD6 provides financial reporting consistency
between demand forecasts, supply plans, company total business
plans, SBU, channel, market and corporate business plans.
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Benefits for Demand
Planning
What we do for the demand planning department is make it a
star. The demand planning department can get credit for all
the good that the demand planning function does for the rest
of the company. A very large majority of individuals who led
the bringing in and implementation of FD6 have been promoted.
FD6 means maximum effectiveness, productivity
and efficiency for the demand planning department. Being supported
by McConnell Chase means excellent and unsurpassed support
from a vendor of vision, science, outstanding product knowledge,
and exceptional willingness to respond to customer requests
that make your solution even better.
FD6 is powerful enough to handle any work
load, any number of users, and do its work fast, which means,
for the demand planning department, the opportunity to push
the envelope of knowledge that bears on business expectations
and continuously improve accuracy.
Built-in systems integration and process
management means setup is fast and easy. The same systems
integration and process management software means it is also
fast and easy to manage changes brought on by such events
as mergers, acquisitions, and expanding the demand planning
and sales and operations process.
Users spend zero time gathering, preparing,
or processing data. Behind the scenes, the FD6 batch jobs
do all the heavy lifting of adding and updating items, maintaining
the hierarchy, importing, organizing, and processing all sorts
of data.
FD6 uses the most accurate statistical
forecasting engine in the world, the winner of the M3 statistical
accuracy competition.
To facilitate collaboration, FD6 provides
a comprehensive pivot table, plus extensive graphical and
reporting functions, that allow people from every department
to aggregate, slice and dice, evaluate, and participate in
the forecasting process according to the units and levels
of detail in which they think, plan and work.
FD6 saves all inputs and expectations from
each forecast and S&OP cycle and provides a complete set
of tools for identifying, prioritizing and correcting forecasting
and planning errors. In forecasting and planning you cannot
expect zero error, but you can expect people to learn from
their mistakes.
Learning from mistakes and correcting bias
by identifying and prioritizing errors, backtracking, and
figuring out how the company went wrong is a chief practice
for factoring better information into a forecasting process.
Another way of putting it -- error analysis is forecasting
and business planning's quality control. FD6's functionality
is especially strong in this area. FD6 greatly helps in identifying
good and bad sources of input and adding to knowledge of markets
and capabilities. Everything that is learned in this process
is competitive advantage for getting better at anticipating
and being in the right place at the right time with the right
stuff.
The FD6 user interface, called Edit
Expectations, is powerful and customizes to each
user's preferences, and operates as well over the internet
as over a local network. Edit Expectations provides:
For sales personnel in the field, FD6 provides
internet access for direct input of expected new business
or field intelligence.
For sales management FD6 provides importation
and calibration of the sales funnel into the forecasting process.
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Benefits for Research
and Development / Engineering
FD6 provides the R&D department forward looking and accurate
integration with business planning -- with marketing, sales,
production, strategic planning.
Given that R&D is integrated with the
rest of the company, the R&D department knows how to prioritize
and allocate its limited resources to meet what is expected
of it. If demand for R&D output exceeds or falls short
of capacity, clarity is available as to what is at stake operationally
and strategically to make decisions on re-allocating, increasing,
or decreasing R&D capacity.
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Benefits for Marketing
FD6 provides the software framework to produce, maintain,
and improve accuracy of total market demand forecasts. (Total
market demand forecasts are greater than or equal to your
sales forecasts plus the sales forecasts of all your competitors.)
Total market demand forecasts can be imported from outside
market analysts or internally produced.
FD6 provides for producing, maintaining,
and improving accuracy of market sales forecasts. These aggregate
forecasts are communicated to the rest of the company within
one integrated solution.
Market sales forecasts may be managed by
product family or channel managers. If managed by product
family or channel, total market sales forecast equal the sum
of product family or channel forecasts within the same market.
New and events can be imported or directly entered to provide
business context by time period to maintain comprehensive
understanding of market outlooks within one system.
Independent and internal market research
can be imported into forecasting scenarios.
Market campaigns can be calibrated and
evaluated.
Promotions and promotional methods can
be represented, modeled, calibrated and evaluated.
Marketing has visibility of and influence
on new product planning and company strategic planning.
Marketing has visibility of field sales
forecasts and field intelligence.
Marketing can do event modeling of any
kind within markets, channels, and product marketing scenarios,
including factoring in of causal forecasts like weather forecasts,
price forecasts, etc.
Marketing can model and monitor the competition.
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Benefits for Sales
Management and Field Sales
FD6 imports and evaluates customer forecasts, providing visibility
and calculating accuracy and bias of these forecasts to assess
their reliability
FD6 flags inaccuracy, bias, abrupt changes
to customer forecasts.
FD6 imports and calibrates the sales funnel
from CRM or prospecting systems for improvement of field sales
forecast accuracy and elimination of bias.
FD6 reports performance to budget and performance
to stretch goals by channel, market, product family, territory,
sales rep, etc.
Custom key performance indicators help
manage sales performance:
- cycle time by
channel
- closing percent
by channel
- customized KPI's
- FD6 provides direct
control of reps forecasts via internal networks and the
internet. Sales reps can include their reasons for overriding
statistical forecasts and other field intelligence as is
appropriate for taking their inputs into account.
In FD6 field sales can manage or monitor
customer inventory (vendor managed inventory, customer managed
inventory) to ensure customer service and cost management.
FD6 provides collaborative planning, forecasting,
and replenishment (CPFR) for improving coordination between
customers and suppliers.
FD6 flags and reports changes in expectations
from the sales force. Looked at as a group these reports can
indicate a pick up or slow down in business, a change of direction,
the entry of a new competitor, the beginning of a cost ripple.
The ability to flag and report unusual changes as a group
is a tool for efficiently understanding the information coming
from the field.
FD6 involves sales in business planning
effectively, efficiently and consistently.
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Benefits for Customer
Service
The main value for customer service is in changing its work
from reacting to problems to adding to good will. Demand planning
and sales and operations planning regularly and proactively
solves, first in aggregate and then in detail, out of balance
conditions before they become problems. Part of solving looming
out of balance conditions involves contingency planning with
inventory and extra capacity. The upshot for customer service
is that instead of being consumed by customer demands, expediting,
and somewhat chaotically fighting for product and capacity,
it gets to do, to a much larger degree, the things that go
the extra mile for the customer and build good will.
A specific function for customer service
is FD6's on-line and real-time available to promise (ATP)
calculation for quoting or setting customer order delivery
dates. Using this ATP function means that if it's important
to try to promise delivery ahead of availability, then a cost
vs. benefit conversation and the needed provisioning can all
be done up front so that integrity is maintained and no one
gets an unhappy surprise later.
FD6 provides standard and custom key performance
indicators for customer service such as fill rate and fulfillment
accuracy.
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Benefits for Production
/ Manufacturing
For proactive capacity planning FD6 offsets and converts units
forecasts to relevant production units such as hours, minutes,
feet, cubic feet, weight, pallets, packages, etc. for
- Labor planning
- Line scheduling
and capacity planning
- Capital projects
- Manufacturing
equipment utilization
- Plant utilization
- Warehouse utilization
To facilitate collaboration with production,
FD6 provides a comprehensive pivot table, plus extensive graphical
and reporting functions, that allow people from every production
dimension to aggregate, slice and dice, evaluate, and participate
in the forecasting process according to the units and levels
of detail in which they think, plan and work. This allows
for aggregate assessment of forecast impact over the medium
and long term on costs, utilization, capacity excess and shortages.
Because supply planning is proactively
balanced with demand planning and the company experiences
much less expediting and rescheduling quality control and
hitting utilization numbers are much easier. Proactive balancing
of supply and demand means much greater ability to accomplish
goals, keep to strategy, and work on productivity and efficiency
opportunities, make numbers, earn bonuses.
Better planning means better contingency
planning for demand spikes.
Much better communication and coordination
with marketing, sales, engineering, and the controller means
better on-time delivery, better customer service, fluid adaptation
of new engineering standards, greater cost savings.
Less excess inventory, excess overtime.
FD6 provides customized key performance
indicators for managing production operations.
Benefits for Materials Management / Production Control / Inventory
Management
FD6 converts seasonal and irregular forecasts to level load
forecasts and exports them into master production scheduling
allowing the plant to run efficiently and cost effectively.
FD6 optimizes finished goods and service
parts inventory to hit customer service targets and minimize
cost.
Demand planning with sales and operations
planning means much greater ability to maintain a valid schedule.
Master scheduler can take over many rescheduling requests
previously dealt with by customer service.
Provides customized key performance indicators
for:
- Finished goods
inventory
- WIP
- Raw materials
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Benefits for Purchasing
Provides medium and long term requirements forecast for negotiating
discounts and capacity allocation.
Supports aggregate enterprise-wide purchases
for improved price-negotiation leverage, competitive price
points, consolidated contracts.
Helps identify opportunities for better
discounts for high volume items.
Supports supplier n-tier collaborative
planning forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) for lower transaction
cost, reducing time and expense of communicating with suppliers.
Helps highlight supplier capacity issues;
proactively detect supplier shortages.
Having an internal level load where desired
translates to level-load supplier production plans, which
makes suppliers happy because they can operate more cost effectively.
Provides visibility of new product forecast
requirements and contingency plans for working with vendors
as early as possible, including contingency planning for growth.
Earliest possible communication of product
deletions for avoiding undue buys.
Reports how much business goes to each
vendor to help optimize source of components and raw materials.
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Benefits for Packaging
Conversions of forecasts to packaging requirements for capacity
planning
Benefits for Distribution, Logistics, Supply Chain Management
Effective and efficient set up, operation, and maintenance
of system -- easy adding of source plants and providers, distribution
centers, sourcing logic for prioritization by cost, transporation
cost, etc, relationships between primary and secondary distribution
centers.
FD6 routinely optimizes inventory levels,
setting safety stock and order quantities so that the right
inventory, and no more, is carried at each point to secure
strategic levels of customer service.
Provides real-time, on-line ATP calculations.
Using this ATP function means that if it's important to try
to promise delivery ahead of availability, then a cost vs.
benefit conversation can and provisioning can all be done
up front so that integrity is maintained and no one gets an
unhappy surprise later.
FD6 provides forecast conversion to weight/pallets,
and any other units.
Provides load to resource calculations
for warehouse, staffing, financing.
Provides key performance indicators for
managing performance such as..
- order picking accuracy
- order picking speed
- optimize labor
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Benefits for Transportation
FD6 provides forecast conversion to weight/pallets, and any
other units.
Carrier collaborative planning forecasting
and replenishment (CPFR).
Customer replenishment -- vendor, customer
managed inventory (order frequency, order geographically,
maximize truckloads, new product launches)
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Benefits for Human
Resources
Demand Planning integrated with S&OP breeds team work
and team spirit; a working environment with team spirit attracts
better people and better team players.
Conversion factors provide capacity requirements
forecasts for staffing decisions for every department.
Key performance indicators clarify what
kind of staff are needed, help identify the right people for
jobs.
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Benefits for Information
Technology
Integrates huge number of business planning functions together
in one package for ease of maintenance and deployment.
Opens relationship with extremely receptive
vendor with avid interest in enhancing product and satisfying
user's needs, removing many projects from the IT department's
in-basket.
Implements on IT department's database
management system of choice or standardization (providing
that said DBMS is one of Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, Informix,
DB2 or Interbase), thus lessening DBMS maintenance work
Provides secure network and internet operations.
Built-in systems integration engine makes
for extremely fast and easy technical implementation and integration
with any ERP solutions, such as SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SSA,
QAD, BAAN, including home-grown.
Same build-in systems integration makes
for fast and easy re-implementation as business circumstances
change, such as mergers and acquisitions, ERP system changes.
Scales and processes high volumes
of data very fast.
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