Michael Anderson
John Becker
Monday, 8:05am: your boss calls you into his office and says, “I just got back from the Supply Chain Forecasting & Planning Conference. We need to start a S&OP process!” He hands you a 9 inch thick textbook and barks “get it going!!.”
So you dutifully read the textbook, gather your team, collate the data, and have your first S&OP meeting. It is a resounding and utter . . . failure. “This data isn’t correct, the sales are off by $1.35!, that’s 0.002%” “What do I care about OEM capacity, I have a trade show next week!” “I don’t have time for another meeting, I have work to do!” Sound familiar? It does to us, as we lived this nightmare twice.
However, we lived to tell this tale, and currently have a solid but basic S&OP process in place at Fender Musical Instrument Corporation. Furthermore, we are on the path to implement a full-fledged S&OP process across our organization including subsidiaries and over-seas offices.
In Phoenix at the IBF Conference on Feb 22-23, we will offer some insights into what to do when the best laid plans fail; how we learned from our mistakes, changed tactics, and ultimately got on the right track. We will discuss how we won over a management team who had lost faith in our data, a sales organization who were indifferent to our efforts, and a marketing team who didn’t realize that S&OP could help them in their effort to create the “Spirit of Rock n’ Roll.” Please bring questions and your own war stories of successes and failures from the S&OP front.
Of course, we welcome hearing your S&OP challenges here too!
John Becker
VP of Global Supply Chain Planning
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation
Mike Anderson
Manager of Global Demand Forecasting
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation
See JOHN BECKER & MICHAEL ANDERSON from FENDER Speak in Phoenix at IBF’S:
February 22-23, 2010
Phoenix, Arizona USA
