SFMF Roundtable
September 5-7, 2007

Sales Forecasting Management Forum--Executive Roundtable University of Tennessee (UTK) Executive Director Paul Dittman, Member Companies and Marketing & Logistics Department Professors
Tom Mentzer, Mark Moon,
Ken Kahn September 5-7, 2007 Knoxville Marriott
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Webcast: August 28, 2007 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum --New Approaches to Sales Forecasting
Dr. John T.( Tom) Mentzer, Bruce Chair of Excellence in Business, Department of Marketing, Logistics and Transportation,
University of Tennessee
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
10AM Pacific, 12 Noon Central,
1PM Eastern
Click to view event detail & enroll

Previous Webcast 7/31 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum -- Implementing a Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment Program
Ron Ireland, Principal,
Oliver Wight Consultants
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
View Recorded Webcast

Previous Webcast 6/26 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum -- Sales Opportunity Pipeline
—The Missing Link in S&OP?
Matt Merritt, GM and Founder of
MCG International,
and EJ Tavella, VP Solutions, Steelwedge Software, Inc.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
Click for More Information

Previous Webcast 5/8 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum -- Sales and Operations Planning for Integrated Business Management
George Palmatier, Principal,
Oliver Wight Consultants
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM PDT
View Recorded Webcast

Previous Webcast 4/3 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum -- How to Extend SAP for effective Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern
Mr. Padman Ramankutty, CEO, Intrigosys, LLC., former CEO and Founder, Bristlecone, Inc.
View Recorded Webcast

Previous Webcast 2/27 --
Best Practices Leadership Forum --S&OP Best Practices:
A Case Study
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
1pm Eastern, 12noon Central,
10am Pacific
Dr. Chris Gopal, Partner,
Deloitte Consulting and former VP Operations Strategy, Dell, Inc.
View Webcast Presentation

Steelwedge Momentum:
Three New S&OP Clients

Spansion, the largest company exclusively focused on Flash
memory solutions.

EDS, a leading global technology
services company delivering
business solutions to its clients.

Honeywell International Inc.
a diversified, technology and manufacturing company,
serving customers worldwide.

Industry Blogs
Here are the Industry Blogs that
we watch, and you might want to:

www.crmblog.org
www.supplychainer.com
www.andyonenterprisesoftware.com
www.siliconvalleywatcher.com
blogs.ittoolbox.com/crm
blogs.ittoolbox.com/supplychain
www.vics.org/blog

Sales Opportunity Pipeline—The Missing Link in S&OP?

Recap of the Steelwedge Best Practices Leadership Forum Webcast, June 26, 2007, featuring Matt Merritt, GM and Founder of MCG International, and EJ Tavella, VP Solutions, Steelwedge Software, Inc.

For the VP of Sales, sales planning, forecast accuracy, sales pipeline intelligence and product mix management must be RIGHT and must be NOW as the CEO/COO, Board of Directors, and the sales teams have to be on the same page. An “autobahn” of information from field sales to sales executives is critical, and RIGHT and NOW are equally important: bottom-up input into the forecast with appropriate levels of review needs to be accurate and reportable; and near real-time field input should be proactive and use exception-based processing and reporting.

There are five challenges to this sales information autobahn: (1) Imprecise and constantly changing sales forecasts; (2) Manual tracking of sales activity through the sales cycle; (3) business dynamics including new deals, changes in manufacturing or availability; (4) plan collaboration and analytics; and (5) no systematic way to manage sales forecasts based on opportunities, sales teams’ performance to past forecasts, by region, by rep and by group.

Lost opportunities result from (1) inaccurate forecasts and cumbersome forecasting; (2) lost or delayed sales due to lack of measurement of sales teams’ performances, inability to proactively manage changes to sales activity and poor forecast accuracy; and (3) lost productivity from inaccurate, manual tracking of sales opportunity progress and sales reporting.

Currently, information silos often result in separate and manual tools and processes for sales forecasting, marketing forecasting and ongoing build forecasting and lead to issues of (1) mobility and off-line capabilities; (2) data validation/quality; (3) performance management analytics and reporting; and (4) Ease of use.

Sales Pipeline Intelligence is often the missing link in the S&OP process. Adding the sales pipeline to the sales information autobahn creates five key benefits: (1) Reduction of forecast process support time by eliminating spreadsheet maintenance & manual data entry with the creation of a single forecast data repository; (2) Improvement in Sales productivity through reduced time by Sales and Business Units entering and re-entering data
and less time spent gathering supporting data & reports; (3) Cross-functional benefits & time savings in improved analysis capabilities, and enhanced Operations reporting & demand details; (4) Scalable tool that can meet global requirements and improve alignment with Organizational requirements; (5) Risk analytics & exception planning and alerts ASP change alerts & exceptions management.

The Steelwedge S&OP solution bridges the sales planning gap between ERP and CRM. Key solution elements include: (1) Sales Pipeline Bridge which translates sales opportunities into meaningful demand information; (2) Enterprise Enabled Excel [E3] for easy online and offline Sales Force Collaboration; (3) Market Trend Analysis bringing market intelligence into the sales planning process; (4)Plan of Record that provides waterfall analysis of sales funnels; and (5) Analytics in the form of management dashboards and performance management reports.

The Steelwedge solution systematically manages, on a real-time basis, all plans while capturing assumptions, events and exceptions. It links all plans (Sales, Marketing, & Build Plan) while capturing a Plan of Record, and provides performance reporting & KPI tracking .The Benefits are the creation of a scalable process, easy “no training” Excel tool for sales, off-line access & analytics, “exception based” planning, and visibility to key KPIs.

Think of Steelwedge S&OP as sales plan enablement that systematically manages process, data and performance. The solution offers proactive flexible business process automation, easy to use and secure Enterprise Enabled Excel and a Plan of Record for performance management and reporting.