Cognos solutions for manufacturing

Globalization, meeting and understanding customer demand and providing optimal operational efficiency drive the need for effective manufacturing sales and operations planning (S&OP). Forward-looking collaboration must occur throughout the enterprise for sales demand to be profitably supported by production capacity.

Beyond silos and spreadsheets

Most companies manage sales and operations planning in departmental silos, with hundreds or even thousands of spreadsheets. Predictable results include:

• Different goals for marketing, sales and manufacturing groups.
• Inconsistent plans, multiple errors and uncoordinated results that threaten overall enterprise objectives.
• Inability to react quickly to shifting customer demand.

Integrate performance management across manufacturing plants

Increasingly, organizations are seeking a robust S&OP model that enables the various groups to jointly address operational issues affecting overall corporate goals. The IBM Cognos Sales and Operations Planning Performance Blueprint offers an integrated performance management model for effectively planning sales and operations across manufacturing plants:

• Workflow for sales and manufacturing functions are presented graphically, for at-a-glance understanding of sales and operations issues.
• Real-time, company-wide workflow visibility ensures that status changes and data consolidation and aggregation are updated in real time, without batch processing.
• Sales organization view tracks forecast and demand modeling for key customers, geographies, channels, and products. New product introduction is factored in to help align sales and operations around one picture of total demand.
• Master planner view allows management of the supply plan across the entire organization. Supply plans can be allocated across multiple plants or contractors with full visibility to the cost and constraint implications of these decisions.
• Plant manager view shows information about the products or product lines specific to each plant, including labor, material and capacity constraints, plant production costs and potential bottlenecks that might jeopardize the supply plan.
• Financial view helps assure that revenue and margin goals are attained. Plant specific costs are considered in finalizing the supply plan. Plant specific P&L statements can be generated in order to achieve the optimum balance between meeting customer demand and profitability.
• Flexible model development enables a wide variety of Web- or Excel-deployable planning models.

Learn more about the IBM Cognos Manufacturing Sales and Operations Planning Performance Blueprint. Download the:

• Issue paper: Manufacturing Sales and Operations Planning (213KB)
• Manufacturing Sales and Operations Planning Business Value Guide and Application Brief (1.4MB)
• Manufacturing Sales and Operations Planning Demo