Aberdeen's SCM Summit & Complex APS systems

Aberdeen conducted its annual Supply Chain Summit this year at San Francisco, CA with an agenda covering Supply Chain leadership, multi enterprise SCM, SCM in uncertain enviroment, Strategies for a global SCM, SCOR, and Working capital optimization in Supply Chains. There were also multiple breakout sessions of which I attended S&OP implementation at Sarah Lee and  Supply Chain success story from Papa Johns. There was also couple of panel discussions on Risk Management in Supply Chains and Retail Supply chain flexibility.

Overall, the conference was very interesting and the brought to light many learnings needed in this tough economic times. Particularly interesting was the details of Integrated Business planning through a integrated S&OP process enabled by steelwedge detailed by Bill Nienberg of Sara Lee.

A key point that was floating around in the networking discussions was the use of Advanced Planning Tools, and the complexities it brings with it. Most discussions were around the question of successes in those implementations. I heard many failure was around master data, the size of implementation, and change that the new system brings. I shared some successful news and strategy of starting small. Particularly about my last engagement where we started with basics Proof of Concept, Prototype and training. Follow that with requirement generation and implementation for a subset of business and then the whole business. Of course, an issue with this was we end up running 2 process for the same function (planning in my case) for a duration of time. This is nothing compared to big bang failure and then going back to the original process and loosing motivation of the people and create aversion. Managing change is key to success of such implementation involving complex tools.