Industry Thought Leaders Share Insights on Managing Portfolio Complexity and Driving Business Growth at Global Event

GAITHERSBURG, Md. – Digital Tempus^®, providing the process expertise, strategic insight and talent development to help innovative companies plan for growth, today announced that the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) track, chaired by Digital Tempus CEO Paul Strzelec at this year’s Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) Annual Global Conference, received high marks for expertise, clarity, and relevancy and was ranked in the Top 3 out of 30 tracks featured at the event. The track included insights on portfolio and planning capabilities from Strzelec and featured industry luminaries from DuPont, Reckitt Benckiser, The Hershey Company, Merck and Company, Inc., and McCormick & Company, each offering their unique industry perspectives on improving company performance amidst dynamically changing market conditions to drive continuous growth.

The S&OP track at the CSCMP event, which was held Oct. 2-5, 2011 in Philadelphia, addressed the fundamentals of how to catalyze continuous growth, with discussions around best practices for demand-driven, integrated planning processes and advanced portfolio capabilities. Key takeaways from the presentations featured in the S&OP track were:

• Get Back To Basics: Getting the fundamentals of S&OP right can make a difference. This includes integrating cross-functional teams to provide both a volume- and value-based perspective of business outlook, as well as integrating global financial data with the underlying demand and supply content, ultimately making for a more successful integrated planning process.
• One Size Does Not Fit All: Companies should leverage segmentation techniques in planning to target performance improvement opportunities and capitalize on those opportunities accordingly. By combining portfolio and planning techniques, organizations can drive segmented strategies and refine processes to achieve measurable performance improvement.
• Rethink Benchmarking: With the increase in analytic capabilities and benchmarking techniques available, companies have more options for determining performance potential through simulation models utilizing their own data. By leveraging share groups in addition to data-driven techniques, companies can further contextualize their own practices and compare with other companies’ organizational processes and operating environments. Combining this data with publicly available information enables the broadest and deepest perspective of opportunities.
• Develop Planning Talent: With 2011 already seeing considerable refocus on talent development to address a recognized gap in the marketplace, companies should establish career paths to retain planning talent. As a key component of talent development, career paths need to include building bridges to cross-functional aspects of the organization to broaden planners’ experience and establish context for more effective decision-making.
• Global is More Than a Template: As companies look to extend S&OP capabilities globally, standardized process templates can help efficiently establish a common understanding of the desired capabilities. However, dramatic differences and critical nuances exist in data, skills and market structure that can significantly impact planning capabilities regionally. Therefore, companies should review go-to-market strategies and business operating environments in each market, and then enhance the global S&OP process with regional considerations to optimize capabilities and business performance.
• Beyond the Software Playbook: Companies continue to invest money, time and resources into buying and implementing software, typically ignoring the segmentation, analytics and skills development critical to maximizing their return on these technology investments. To generate real process improvements in S&OP, companies should refocus their energy on building the planning competencies and capabilities to ensure measurable, sustainable growth.

"The response to this year's S&OP track was extremely positive, as the presentations from these experts provided much-needed insights into critical facets of S&OP that were well-received by attendees," said Rick Blasgen, president and CEO, CSCMP. "Paul Strzelec’s practical experience and deep understanding of the issues surrounding portfolio and planning capabilities and talent development were essential to preparing a lineup of insightful thought leaders and content for our conference. The perspectives offered by these industry professionals provided those who attended the CSCMP Conference strategies and techniques for managing portfolio complexity and driving business growth amidst dynamic market conditions."

About Digital Tempus
Digital Tempus provides process expertise, strategic insight and talent development to help global companies improve strategic and operational planning capabilities. The combination of experience and business intelligence services defines Digital Tempus’ unique approach that supports the world’s most admired companies in their efforts to plan better, improve decision-making, enable more effective execution and consistently create opportunities to drive profitable growth. These companies include leaders in their fields such as Church & Dwight, Co., DuPont, McCormick and Nalco. Digital Tempus has offices in the United States and Europe and can be found on the web at www.digitaltempus.com.

Media Contacts:
Mark Van Hook | Articulate Communications Inc. | +1 212.255.0080 ext.