The People Part of S&OP: Part II

In the 1950s, coal mining productivity in the UK decreased. Ironically, productivity went down because of the introduction of machinery specifically designed to improve productivity. Why did the machinery not increase productivity? While the machinery was designed to improve productivity, the people part of the system was still operating under the status quo. No wonder productivity went in the wrong direction.

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The People Part of S&OP: Part I

Lora Cecere is one smart supply chain expert. She began her career as a supply chain professional with the companies like Clorox and P&G. She worked at Manugistics developing supply chain software and then moved on to become a top notch supply chain analyst and thinker at the Gartner Group and AMR Research. Currently she is the CEO of a Supply Chain Insights and the author of the best supply blog there is: Supply Chain Shaman. (Don't get us wrong, we are proud of our blog but we Supply Chain Shaman is the standard against which we measure ourselves.)

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ERP and Excel: Part II

In Part I, we discussed the proper use of Excel with ERPs. We advised against using Excel to manage planning and other operational transactions. In Part II, we will backtrack on that advice, a little, and discuss when it is actually appropriate to use Excel spreadsheets for operations planning and other transactions.

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ERP and Excel: Part I

Excel is an indispensable tool in modern business. We use it every day. We use it in varying degrees of deftness and aptitude. Some of us use it as a giant calculator while others take advantage of functions, pivot tables, macros, and visual basic. We use it to handle small amounts of data to creat files so large they exceed the limits of some email services (thankfully there is dropbox and other file sharing applications). We use it to draw all kinds of graphs. We cut and paste part of spreadsheets and graphs from Excel to Word and PowerPoint. As helpful and indispensable a tool as Excel is, there are good uses and there are certainly abuses. For purposes of this posting, we will consider the use of Excel in conjunction with ERPs. ERPs such as SAP and Oracle are designed to manage, in a connected way, the transactions of a business. They provide an integrated data structure from transactions to the general ledger to financial reporting. The main benefit from our perspective is data integration and allowing the system to handle the bulk of the transactions and people to manage exceptions. The people then work to minimize the exceptions over time through process improvements and sound data management.

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