Five Product Modules to Improve Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Performance Management
Fortune 1000 sales executives are managing top-line revenue, and improving their overall sales performance with Steelwedge Software. They have turned to Steelwedge because they realized that, despite investments in ERP, CRM, and BI solutions, they were unsuccessful in fully controlling the planning around the lifeblood of their enterprise - revenue.
Steelwedge’s Sales Planning & Performance Management (SPPM) suite leverages four dynamic modules and a powerful S&OP platform that incorporate best-practice S&OP collaborative technologies with business workflows and performance management capabilities that help companies take enterprise-wide top-down (and bottom-up, middle-out) control over every aspect of the revenue planning process.
S&OP Sales – Steelwedge’s S&OP Sales delivers the ability to better understand, predict and manage sales and demand by automating and optimizing a collaborative Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process. Engaging multiple business functions—including Sales, Marketing, Finance and Operations—to participate in S&OP and reach a consensus demand plan remains a challenge for the majority of enterprises. While most companies have one or more functional solution to support individual views (CRM, Demand Planning, Sales Forecasting applications), few companies have a single solution that compares, reconciles and combines the different forecasts into a published consensus forecast that drives S&OP.
Steelwedge’s S&OP Sales module delivers the power of a collaborative planning platform via a familiar Excel User Interface to help enterprises achieve a more accurate sales and demand plan that improves the quality of the consensus forceast and optimizes company performance.
S&OP Operations – While most companies have an inventory and supply plan solution for operations, few have the ability to view real-time forecast changes and assumptions from Sales, Operations, Marketing, and Finance in a single, shared environment. As a result, updates to operational plans are typically delayed, leading to inventory imbalances which may significantly impact your bottom line.
The Steelwedge S&OP Operations module accelerates S&OP by providing a single solution for creating and/or viewing an inventory and supply plan, consolidating the supply plan with the sales and demand plan, considering various demand-supply balancing scenarios and performing Rough Cut Capacity Planning.
Executive S&OP – Steelwedge Executive S&OP is a decision making solution that integrates financial planning with sales and operational issues to improve operational efficiencies. Executive S&OP drives the Sales & Operations Planning process and ensures alignment between corporate strategy and operational execution. Steelwedge Executive S&OP engages all stakeholders and ensures that decisions are made in a timely and fact-based manner. The Steelwedge Executive S&OP solution incorporates financial and operating metrics, performance feedback, and simulation capabilities to ensure that the best possible decisions are made.
S&OP Collaboration – The Steelwedge S&OP Collaboration extends the S&OP process to external customers and suppliers. Companies use S&OP Collaboration as a platform to share forecast and supply planning assumptions. S&OP Collaboration provides the ability to securely share information with partners to improve the accuracy of the planning process.
Companies may use S&OP Collaboration to support variety of solutions including:
S&OP Platform – The Steelwedge S&OP Platform includes the Steelwedge technology foundation reflecting over a decade of research and development into the core requirements for effective S&OP. Steelwedge’s S&OP Platform offers a powerful, easy-to-use, and highly scalable platform that incorporates the following technological advantages:
Performance Management – Understanding actual company-wide and functional performance is critical to realizing goals and proactively resolving issues. Monitoring progress towards committed plans and achieving an enterprise-wide view into financial, operations, and sales performance is often a difficult process.
Steelwedge’s Performance Management (PM) capability enables you to capture critical Key Performance Indicators across functional groups and perspectives and in meaningful measures and levels of detail. PM leverages the power and familiarity of Excel, offering configurable, real-time reports, dashboards and exception alerts with drill-down capabilities, delivered via email.
PM provides both a meaningful, user-specific view—whether a detailed planner or enterprise-wide, executive dashboard or report summarizing financial results and key performance indicators—along with the ability to navigate across and within different slices of data and functions. With PRM, users can easily analyze their “slice of the world” to determine how to best drive company performance.
With Steelwedge’s PM, you get a powerful reporting and management tool that leverages Steelwedge’s exensive S&OP reporting and performance metrics Best Practices Library.
