16 Apr 2024
The Fundamental Element in Planning – Trust
By: Greg Spira and Charity Lopez No one can predict the future, but businesses that plan well are better poised…
26 Mar 2024
How to Overcome the Challenge of Demonstrating ROI for Demand Plan Management
By: Greg Spira and Todd Ferguson A new regional operations leader discovered an issue with his company’s demand plans: they…
19 Mar 2024
How to Determine the Root Cause of Inventory Management Problems
By: Leon Dixon When a company has an inventory problem—whether it is too much, too little, or the wrong mix—the…
22 Feb 2024
Integrated Tactical Planning (ITP) vs. Sales and Operations Execution (S&OE)
by: Todd Ferguson and Wilson Stefano, Jr In response to changing business conditions that impact near-term execution, many companies run…
16 Aug 2023
Strategic Vs. Tactical Planning
By: Todd Ferguson Each level of the organization needs processes to achieve strategic, long-term, and short-term goals for a business…
09 Aug 2023
One simple way to measure the effectiveness of your IBP / S&OP process
By: Greg Spira I was recently chatting with a colleague who is working on the integration of an acquisition. He…
16 Feb 2023
Become better prepared for crisis — and opportunity — with effective Sc...
By: Timm Reiher Change is inevitable for every company. Creating plans designed to stand up to anything the future holds…
09 Nov 2022
Emotional Intelligence
By: Donald McNaughton ‘Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our…
21 Oct 2022
Why should your CEO care about Demand Plan Bias?
By: Greg Spira There are many ways to measure the characteristics of a Demand Plan. Its accuracy can be calculated…
17 Jun 2022
Facilitating the Demand Review
By: Greg Spira It’s a commonly shared best-practice that demand planning is a multiple-input process, through which different commercial perspectives…
15 Jun 2022
Planning for New Products
By Greg Spira Planning demand for existing products already being sold is tough enough, where consumer and market behaviors are…
21 Oct 2021
Using Integrated Business Planning to boost your Customer Lifetime Value
Written by: David Goddard You know the old line: It’s better to keep an existing customer than try to find…
22 Sep 2021
The Fundamentals of Business Performance Improvement
Written by: Daniel Meier Whether you’re an up-and-coming startup or an established enterprise, sustainable growth is the name of the…
25 Aug 2021
Skills
Written By Donald McNaughton ‘Talent you have naturally. Skill is only developed by hours and hours and hours of beating on…
18 Aug 2021
Demand Planning – Nomads of the Org Chart
Written by Greg Spira Much like Godwin’s law, as any discussion about Demand Planning grows longer, the probability of debating…
11 Aug 2021
Who Are The Customers of the Demand Plan?
Written by Greg Spira When we use the term customers in the context of demand planning, most often we are talking about…
04 Aug 2021
The Vital Role of Finance in IBP – Part 1
Written by Crystal Lee Oh, the clichés modern media has created! Consider the stereotypes that are all too common in…
28 Jul 2021
Go Get’s, Gap Fillers, Plugs, and other Bad Behaviors
Written by Greg Spira In one of my earlier posts, I stressed the point that eliminating Bias in the demand…
21 Jul 2021
IBP From the Eyes of the CFO Part 3 – Time is Money
Written by Crystal Lee While so often we talk about the need to be decisive, sometimes being decisive, means deciding…
14 Jul 2021
What is Best-In-Class Forecast Accuracy?
Written by Greg Spira When working with companies to improve their demand planning, I regularly get the question: “What is…
13 Jul 2021
How Integrated Business Planning Helped One Company Start Looking to the Future
As a 120-year-old institution, the salad dressing manufacturer Marzetti had survived many of the ups and downs of the ever-changing…
07 Jul 2021
IBP From the Eyes of a CFO Part 2 – The Good Sherpa
Written by Crystal Lee Imagine deciding to climb Mount Everest. This 29,000-foot journey is not only difficult, it is dangerous….
24 Jun 2021
IBP From the Eyes of a CFO Part 1- Covenants of Performance
Written by Crystal Lee The increased accountability that comes with implementing an Integrated Business Plan sometimes isn’t welcomed news within…
16 Jun 2021
The Importance of Language in Planning
Written by Greg Spira One of the first things that I do when working with a company is carefully listen…
09 Jun 2021
Learning
Written By Donald McNaughton ‘Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.’ — Benjamin…
02 Jun 2021
Money Talks
Written by Crystal Lee Sometimes the most profound truths are quite simple. And, as it pertains to business, the simple…
25 May 2021
Good Questions Drive Good Assumptions
Written by Greg Spira Often businesses struggle with a demand planning process anchored in numbers. If you are spending your…
18 May 2021
Understanding
Written By Donald McNaughton ‘Commitment without understanding is a liability.’ — Oliver Wight One of the many things that my mentor…
11 May 2021
Mentors
Written By Donald McNaughton ‘The delicate balance of mentoring someone is not creating them in your own image but giving them…
04 May 2021
Add Visuals to Drive Action
Written by Crystal Lee One of the most successful television shows of all time is AMC’s classic period piece Mad…
27 Apr 2021
Stories Tell More Than Words Alone Ever Can
Written by Crystal Lee When you think back on your time in college / university, you will likely recall at…
20 Apr 2021
Overriding the Demand Plan
Written by Greg Spira When someone wants to change a plan number, the questions to ask are: “Why? Which assumption…
13 Apr 2021
Passion
Written By Donald McNaughton ‘In all my research, the greatest leaders looked inward and were able to tell a good story…
06 Apr 2021
Tactical Execution Builds a Bridge to Long-Term Success
Written by Crystal Lee I have two friends with a history of air travel anxiety. Though they each had been…
23 Mar 2021
Unlock the Agility of a Sales And Operations (Re)Plan
Written by Crystal Lee When re-planning is ingrained in a business’s IBP/S&OP process, management teams are able to more efficiently…
09 Mar 2021
Trust In the Demand Plan
Written by Greg Spira Leaders, like most people, make decisions and operate on that which they trust. If they don’t…
02 Mar 2021
Make it Happen With a Scenario Management Leader
Written by Crystal Lee There was once a company on the rise, who decided to take hold of their promising…
25 Feb 2021
Sharing
Written By Donald McNaughton After more than 21 years of supporting clients through education and consulting services I am periodically asked…
03 Jun 2020
Scenario Planning – An Agile Framework to Develop Responses to Coronavirus
By Pamelyn Lindsey, CSCP, Oliver Wight Business Advisor With the impacts of the Coronavirus continuing to advance, how can we…
03 Jun 2020
Five reasons why your business will miss out on post COVID-19 opportunities
By Stuart Harman, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific As countries, economies, communities and companies continue to work through the…
01 May 2020
How do you plan for something that you can’t predict? Lessons from Coronavirus
By Stuart Harman and Rod Hozack, Partners at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific With the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak that originated in…
01 May 2020
Should you throw out your Integrated Business Planning process in the curre...
By Stuart Harman and Rod Hozack, Partners at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific One CEO recently asked us “how do we…
01 May 2020
Coronavirus: Can you plan for a pandemic?
By Andy Walker, Partner at Oliver Wight EAME It’s hard to imagine that two months ago hardly anyone had heard…
01 May 2020
Re-aligning demand plans to reflect reality: The importance of demand assum...
By Debbie Bowen-Heaton, Oliver Wight Partner The last few weeks have drastically reinforced to me and my clients, the need…
01 May 2020
Why does integrated planning remain important during the coronavirus crisis?
By Oliver Wight CEO, Les Brookes Over the past few weeks I have come across some comments dismissing the capability…
01 May 2020
The Integrated Tactical Planning Sequence – Part 6 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific Is there a sequence of steps to make the ITP process…
01 May 2020
Who Is Managing the ITP Process? Part 5 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific More than anything else, the quorum of people managing Integrated Tactical…
01 May 2020
How Is Change Managed In Your Business? Part 4 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific Change in the context of Integrated Business Planning is defined as…
01 May 2020
What plans are managed with ITP? Part 3 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific In the last article, we defined time fences and outlined the…
15 Apr 2020
The Foundations of Effective ITP – Time Fences. Part 2 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific In our previous blog, we discussed what Integrated Tactical Planning is…
15 Apr 2020
What is Integrated Tactical Planning (ITP)? Part 1 of 6
By Rod Hozack, Partner at Oliver Wight Asia Pacific There has been an enormous amount of literature published about Sales…
15 Apr 2020
Scenario Planning: A Necessary Skill to Drive Better Decision Making in Int...
By Pamelyn Lindsey, CSCP, Oliver Wight Business Advisor This blog is part of a learning series on Scenario Planning. Please…
19 Jun 2019
Does Supply Chain Excellence Spoil Like Fruit Left Out on the Kitchen Counter?
In our recent survey, we received 124 responses providing us with some interesting insights on both the causes of this deterioration as well as the reasons why the level of supply chain excellence either stayed the same or got better.
20 Mar 2019
Minimizing Chaos With Demand Control and Execution
It is probably safe to say we all have lived through a bit of chaos at times, where we feel things are out of control and fires are popping up everywhere. This can apply to a number of areas. If we think about how this applies to Demand Execution, we see executives getting involved in the details.
20 Nov 2018
Too Important to Fail How to Ensure Improvement Projects Drive Sustained Success
Whether a large project across many global business segments and years, or a small quick improvement project taking less than a quarter, there is a high risk of failure. Even if successful, the results may not be sustainable.
29 Oct 2018
Integrated Business Planning Is Key to Making Annual Planning a ‘Signific...
Businesses today face ever-increasing frequency and magnitude of change in the global marketplace. Companies that still do annual planning and budgeting the traditional way are wasting time and money and will be left behind.
05 Jun 2018
The Challenges of Leadership Today
No matter how large or small, manufacturing or pharmaceutical or electronics, every business relies on a leader to chart the course and steer the ship. But if your talent is paddling a dinghy while the competition is piloting a super yacht, your business will sink in a nanosecond.
27 Apr 2018
The Perils of Decision Making: Would You Rather Be Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong?
Decision making can be one of the most frustrating aspects of being a leader, a manager, an employee, and a human being. Decisions are second guessed. That’s the genesis of the term “arm-chair quarterback.” It seems much easier to debate a decision after it has been made than to make the decision in the first place. Information requested upon which to base a decision is not believed. People fight over the information. Is the data right? Go get more data to prove whether it is right or wrong.
27 Oct 2017
Hello Finance – Are You Engaged?
We know what you’re likely to say. “Sure, we’re engaged. We ensure the books are accurate. We handle the monthly…
28 Sep 2017
Stop Arguing. Start Scenario Planning.
I hate arguments. Some people say arguing among executives spurs greater creativity when problem solving. I disagree. All too often,…
31 Aug 2017
Hey CFOs – Are You Seeing the Right Stuff?
Before you answer that, let us answer for you … “Probably not!” Our experience, both as financial practitioners and consultants,…
15 Jun 2017
How to Maintain a Competitive Advantage In a Global 2017 Marketplace
With an ever-growing number of technologies available, as well as globally mobile talent, many companies are turning to their people…
26 May 2017
Learn How To Avoid Crippling Supply Chain Challenges Before It’s Too Late
Recently I’ve helped supply teams that had lost the ability to plan and control their supply chain with realistic expectations, develop…
03 May 2017
Getting Executives Out of the Weeds to Focus on the Business / Insights Fro...
I often come across executives who are frustrated and exhausted – from firefighting, from running meeting to meeting only to…
28 Apr 2017
Product and Portfolio Management
Our Product and Portfolio Management course is designed to drive home Oliver Wight’s best practices with extensive visuals, media, simulations,…
04 Apr 2017
The Three Key Challenges That Middle-Market Businesses are Facing
All companies face difficulties when it comes to sustaining growth due to unpredictable economic conditions and competition. Middle-market companies, however,…
15 Mar 2017
Three Powerful Traits of Large, Successful, Consumer Goods Companies
It can be extremely stressful for organizations to hit their numbers, especially so for the executives who are in charge…
06 Mar 2017
Demand Management: Resources to grow your business
Just get assigned to a new role in Demand or Forecasting and not sure where to turn for professional assistance? …
28 Feb 2017
How To Leverage Millennial Traits Through IBP
Did you know that when you Google “How to improve millennial retention rates?” over one million different search results come…
14 Feb 2017
The Art of New Product Demand Planning
There is an old saying; “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” However, if you never understood what…
30 Dec 2016
Welcome to Oliver Wight Americas’ new blog!
As leading educators and business coaches in disciplines such as Integrated Business Planning (Advanced S&OP), Demand Planning, and Integrated Planning…
