Phoenix, AZ—Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit — Steelwedge, the leading provider of cloud-based Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, has announced the availability of its latest release at the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit, the largest industry conference for supply chain executives. The new Steelwedge solution is targeted to help global manufacturers more quickly and accurately make supply/demand tradeoff decisions in the face of continual market change.
“The world’s leading manufacturers are recognizing that increasingly complex, interdependent businesses—and the plans built to manage them — will only survive with better agility and resilience built into them,” said Glen Margolis, CEO of Steelwedge. “This agility comes from a potent combination of company-wide insight and systems to put that insight into action. This release of our planning solution with cloud-powered analytics, apps and high performance throughput of big data is designed to help our customers better out-maneuver market volatility and drive growth.”
The Steelwedge spring release extends the value of the company’s integrated business planning platform in three ways:
Steelwedge S&OP Insight: Complex Data. Delivered iPad Easy.
Now, the rich cross-functional data collected in the Steelwedge planning system is aggregated, analyzed and presented in top-line dashboards for iPads or smartphones as well as online and Excel-based dashboards and reports. With Steelwedge S&OP Insight, corporate leaders can review real-time aggregated summary content across divisions, geographies, hierarchies and units/dollars anytime on their mobile devices. With a dozen pre-configured best-practice metrics, Steelwedge S&OP Insight makes it easy to pinpoint exceptions and business KPIs for further focus.
“The capability that our customers expect from us is the ability to rapidly configure the solution and roll it out to multiple business units and geographic locations,” says Nari Viswanathan, vice president of product management for Steelwedge. “This is what attracts companies to us.”
Powered by the industry’s only planning analytics engine, Steelwedge S&OP Insight combines online analytics and planning to deliver rich contextual planning intelligence in a fraction of the time of any other approach on the market. More information is available in the Steelwedge S&OP Insight Mobile Analytics data sheet.
Industry analysts acknowledge that S&OP analytics are sorely needed to drive better, faster planning decisions. Many supply chain analysts note that there is a substantial separation today between operational data and S&OP planning. By contrast, Steelwedge is putting analytics into the center of customers’ supply chain performance — where it needs to be.
“Steelwedge has already identified the keys elements needed to perform analytics to put out a solution available out-of-the-box,” adds Viswanathan. “Synchronization will happen seamlessly in the background in a matter of minutes. This will allow users to make changes, plan, and then pull it into an analytics environment in near real time and then go back and forth. This level of highly interactive capability is what we’re enabling for users.”
Steelwedge S&OP Apps Architecture™: Adopts “Orphaned” Processes; Adapts Planning Your Way.
Often, competitive advantage comes from the way a business is run — and the unique processes and KPIs it sets for itself. These could range from new product prioritization to inventory segmentation parameters.
Traditionally, there has been no way to include those special processes in an automated planning solution. Now, customers and partners can develop their own apps, built directly on the Steelwedge platform for seamless integration with the powerful demand, supply, partner collaboration and executive-level S&OP data that is captured in its single solution.
“We are working with different partners to be able to offer our customers a wide-variety of apps to help them run their business,” explains Viswanathan. “The focus on customers is very important for us because it’s customers that are driving us to focus heavily in this area.”
Based on customer demand, the company is also offering a set of pre-configured apps those for demand policy, segmentation, and stocking strategy. Click here for more information on these apps and the Steelwedge S&OP Open Apps Architecture.
Big-Data-Enabled Foundation. Faster performance for faster decisions.
Steelwedge has invested in technology infrastructure to extend the cloud-based platform’s power to quickly process massive amounts of data — anywhere in the world — faster, for better decision-making on critical planning issues. Steelwedge customers tasked with tracking, managing and analyzing up to billions of planning details — from SKUs and components to suppliers and customer transactions — benefit from the newest technology enhancements delivered through the cloud without incurring the significant incremental infrastructure costs they would have with an on-premise S&OP solution.
“What we are seeing is that the last frontier needed to achieve the business value companies seek is the concept of Big Data,” says Viswanathan. “This explosion of data available really requires companies to have more advanced S&OP technology gather this data and to make it useful. Steelwedge, being a cloud-based company, reduces the cost of implementation for customers.”
The recent Steelwedge infrastructure upgrades encompass investments in the following areas:
- Storage: Faster reporting and analytics and faster planning (overrides and aggregation)
- Network: High throughput, low latency, quality of service and failover. Rapidly transfer large files with minimal latency
- Edge Caching: Faster performance for remote users
- Memory and CPU: In-memory add-ons support columnar indexing of data and fast “what-if” analysis
Blake Johnson, Stanford University consulting professor and founder of range planning company Aztral, said: “The big data tsunami is at the front of every business, supply chain and educational discussion. To create business value with it, however, it must be integrated with a company’s core processes and accessible to the people who manage them. Steelwedge’s approach to integrating data and enabling analytics is industry-leading, and is driving a sea change in S&OP.”
About Steelwedge
Steelwedge Software is the leading Integrated Business Planning solution provider. Steelwedge’s cloud-based Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) software solutions connect people, process and technology to power a single view of a company’s business. In a volatile global business environment, that single line of sight powers reliable "what if" scenario modelling that pinpoints the financial impact of supply-demand trade-off decisions. Some of the world's largest manufacturing companies including Jaguar Land Rover, Lenovo, MetroPCS, Monsanto and Sony, trust Steelwedge to help them mitigate risk and rapidly adapt to global economic, political and environmental change through best-in-class S&OP.
For more information, please visit www.steelwedge.com.