Route to Market & Supply Chain Blog

Sku's sneak onto price lists when nobody is looking. Sales & Marketing colleagues like launches with lengthy lists of skus; different flavours, different sizes, different colours. How many shelf facings do they want? How do these decisions get…

This is relatively easy but it requires rigour and discipline plus top-down leadership ideally through a harmonious S&OP process. Month, quarter and year-end push. -- Run your business on one set of numbers agreed at Board level and ensure NOBODY…

Before Capello leads England to world cup glory in South Africa (you read it here second!) There is much to observe about his approach to leadership in the context of Supply Chain and S&OP in particular: Makes Decisions. At the end of the…

An open and transparent engagement with your LSP can deliver tangible business benefits in addition to a less stressed working environment; consider some of the following pointers in your relationships with LSPs. Information sharing: Be willing to…

The sales forecast is the main driver of the S&OP process. This is the critical input to the process and the successes of all subsequent planning actions are dependent on the accuracy of the forecast. Working as a supply chain consultant for…

We often hear FMCG businesses complain about being let down by their Logistics providers. "They couldn't deliver "Not enough space in the warehouse" "Trucks in the wrong location", "Resource constraints" etc. The standard response is to despatch the…

"We don't have a proper forecasting tool", "everyone has their own spreadsheet" "issues with the EDI interface", "the systems don't talk to each other", "the upload to our ERP system failed". How many more IT based excuses for poor demand planning…

In 24 years as a Supply Chain consultant in the FMCG business sector I have been part of many Sales & Operational Planning (S&OP) projects - working with clients to implement them has been relatively simple process but the difficulty is working with…