One size doesn't fit all. Introducing the Five Factors.

Companies have spent tens of billions of dollars on demand and supply planning systems over the past decade, yet most still struggle with planning.  Most executives we talk to lament the inability of their organizations to sustain initial blips of improvement in forecast accuracy, working capital and supply chain costs their planning implementations may have delivered.  The proof points are all around us --- the CPG company whose forecast accuracy went from 72% to 85% back to 72%, or the one whose inventory levels briefly dipped before returning to previous levels or higher after a major investment and initiative to improve processes. In many cases, companies demonstrate that they can reach new levels of performance, something changes, and the company fails to sustain the proficiency and performance. Why?

The answer lies in the Five Factors.

Market Dynamics
Since 2008, global markets have been increasingly volatile.  Digital Tempus helps companies to understand market volatility and diagnose the root causes of self-inflicted volatility, and then develop and implement strategies to deal with it.

Shifting Business Patterns
Customer and consumer buying patterns have changed.  If you were to examine your company’s product, market and customer portfolio, you would likely find that the business patterns and dynamics that exist today are not only different than those of a couple of years ago, but they vary widely across your portfolio. Yet most companies apply the same forecasting and planning techniques and strategies to everything - a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach.

The reality is that one size doesn’t fit all.  Digital Tempus provides insightful analysis to help you understand the dynamics and patterns across your company’s portfolio, and develop targeted approaches to forecasting and planning that improve performance.

People
While companies have had little difficulty spending money on systems, they have invested comparatively little in the people who use those systems.  In fact, training is often viewed as a cost, rather than a much-needed and high-return investment.  While most business executives would agree that it’s easier to execute more perfectly (flawless execution) when operating in the context of a well thought-out plan, few companies have made the necessary investments to really develop planning talent.

Process
It really is a vicious cycle.  Your planning team gets pulled into execution issues – putting out fires – many of which are a result of unanticipated shifts in demand (up and down).  Essentially, planners are so busy executing that they have no time to plan.  Each planner has skills they would like to advance, but finding time to develop the requisite planning skills is even more difficult, given all of the pressing issues.  There’s no time and no clear path to breaking the vicious cycle.  The process is broken.  So the team continue to fight fires, hoping things will get better.

Implementing the best planning systems won’t improve your planning unless you break the vicious cycle and fix the process. Leadership is required.  Companies that are best-in-class at planning have an executive leading core planning processes like S&OP.

Digital Tempus not only helps you to design and deploy the best processes, we help you to get leadership engaged in driving them.

Technology
84% of companies use Microsoft Excel to plan.  The other 16% just refuse to admit it.  Despite the tens of billions spent on planning applications, almost every company we talk to uses Excel in some way to help them with planning.  Why?  It’s not that the planning applications don’t have lots of features and functions -- they do. In fact, they have more than most companies can use.  It’s just that understanding all of these bells and whistles is challenging, and usually not intuitive.  So people turn to what they know best, and we’ve seen planners configure Excel to do amazing things.  The downside is that each person ends up with his/her own version of the plan, when the whole point of implementing the planning system in the first place was to get everyone on the same page.

Digital Tempus makes planning systems work.  Based on your goals and objectives, we’ll help you to understand which features and functions are critical, which ones are optional, and how to configure them to support your business process and improve performance.