By 2018, 75% of manufacturers will be co-ordinating enterprise-wide planning activities under the umbrella of rapid integrated business planning (rIBP), according to IDC Manufacturing Insights.
A new study, IDC PlanScape: Implementing a Rapid Integrated Business Planning Processes as Part of a Next-Generation Supply Chain, dives deeper into the prediction and provides decision makers and executives within leading manufacturers the critical elements for success in next-generation supply chains.
“As an industry, manufacturing has wrestled with sales and operations planning (S&OP) for what seems like decades, yet at IDC Manufacturing Insights, we’d suggest that simply doing S&OP isn’t sufficient. We would argue that aligned and integrated planning efforts must be enterprise wide, ensuring that efforts are not wasted or pursued in opposition to each other. It is this notion, one we call rapid integrated business planning, that we see as the future,” says Simon Ellis, practice director: global supply chain strategies at IDC.
The new IDC PlanScape offers a unique decision-making tool to help IT professionals plan the evolution of the IT operations architecture to virtualised networks. It helps to assure business value from technology by establishing a business case, identifying risk factors, and outlining critical success factors.
IDC Manufacturing Insights asserts that it is no secret that the supply chain of today is vastly different from the supply chain of the past. Today’s consumer (and by extension, the customer) has much more power in the buyer/seller relationship, due both to the abundance of information available and an increasingly competitive environment. This fact is driving manufacturing firms to identify additional sources of competitive advantage by which to better satisfy an increasingly demanding customer.
With this in mind, IDC Manufacturing Insights offers the following advice to consider (to name a few key steps for consideration):
* Ensure that your business is able to meet the general speed requirements of the marketplace, and validate if internal processes help or hinder these requirements.
* Confirm that your business is not lacking resilience to supply chain ‘shocks’, either by failing to respond quickly (time to recovery) or by incurring short-term cost premiums.
* Create and/or update your S&OP process and validate what is the breadth of functional participation.