Constance Korol

Last night I had the pleasure of previewing the International Auto Show at the Jacob Javitz Center courtesy of Ford and the Social Media Club of New York City/ SMCNYC.

Scott Monty at the International Auto Show in New York City

We were certainly warmly welcomed as we were treated to a cocktail reception and a great networking opportunity with not only social media mavens but Ford executives such as Scott Monty, Head of Social Media at Ford, as well. I have seen Scott speak before at last year’s BlogWorld show but the event was overwhelmingly huge making  it quite difficult to approach him with so many people vying for his attention. This time it was much easier to get a moment to speak with him

We discussed Ford’s success over the past couple of years due in no small part to the company’s focus on profitability and staying true to the brand  but more importantly, their focus on relationships. He seemed extremely proud to be able to say “We didn’t take a dime from the government”. Ford leveraged social media by aggregating consumer ideas, collaborating with others with one goal, to make the best vehicle….”Together we arrive at a better decision”.  While social media played a role in developing and improving Ford’s relationships with consumers, Scott also mentioned in his short talk that the company also made it a priority to maintain a healthy relationship with its employees. This meant that even during the suffering economy, Ford employee morale remained stable.  I asked Scott if Ford has been struggling with supply chain issues and/or facing out of stock situations as a result of the crises in Japan. He replied on a similar theme, crediting great relationships with their suppliers for the fact that  they are doing OK.

Scott summed up his talk with the words that any good company would want to hear from their consumers, employees, suppliers or simply those that like them on Facebook…… “They built a relationship with me, I trust Ford”

How are relationships benefiting your business/company?  Take our poll on Linkedin and let us know your feedback in the comments.

Constance Korol: IBF

The IBF’s 10^th annual Supply Chain Forecasting and Planning Conference turned out to be an incredible three days at the Villas of Grand Cypress Resort in Orlando, Florida. We kicked things off with a spectacular golf outing where we got to meet new friends and enjoyed the summer like conditions. We all did our best to navigate the challenging greens and fairways as we competed to place or win a prize donated by our sponsors Forecast Pro. It was exciting to see familiar faces from years past, make new friends, as well as finally meet folks that are in my LinkedIn network. As we had a laugh about our golf game, shared our forecasting challenges with one another, the golf outing became so much more than just an opportunity to simply exchange business cards.

Now that I have returned home and the weatherman is forecasting temperatures in the low teens, I am taking some time to reflect on the conversations I had at lunch and the cocktail reception, as well as the notes taken during the presentations. I found a certain sense of satisfaction for what the IBF does while listening to two attendees describe their past day and a half of learning like therapy sessions.  They just needed a couch and a towel.   They also described some sessions as enjoyable as the new car smell, eye opening.

In my 10 year tenure with the IBF, I don’t think that I can recall ever hearing a planning and forecasting professional say that his or her job was easy. Yet, over the years and certainly in the past couple of days during this conference,  I have met many passionate professionals that work and oversee teams that are willing to fight to keep forecasting and planning at the forefront of critical business practices at the company.

Gaining recognition for demand planning and forecasting continues to be a struggle for many of our attendees and professionals in the field all over the world.  But, many are beginning to realize how special they are to have this challenge.  Those without thick skin, need not apply. There is the necessary effort and energy to learn new tools and establish a process that enables consensus to come together as one. Demand planning & forecasting professionals also need to keep their communication and statistical skills sharp so that they can effectively grow in their career and fight battles with facts and numbers. From all of the nodding heads in the room, we could tell that our Keynote Speaker, Michael Wachtel, Vice President of Demand Planning at L’Oreal, really hit home when he said “Take the emotion out of the room, let the numbers tell the story”.

As a marketer, I chuckled at this at first, since marketers are very often stereotyped as the optimistic ones in the room. Some of that optimism certainly comes from the excitement about a new campaign and ideas that have soared into never never land. This brought to light the reason that there is a need to hold monthly consensus meetings.  Different disciplines have their own battles to fight. From the planning and forecasting perspective, the numbers may be factual, but selling them can be challenging when other disciplines may have stronger personalities or driven by other incentives. With all of these pressures and obstacles, it can be understood that words of encouragement and lessons learned would act as therapy to the group. Hearing someone like Michael Wachtel who is deeply embedded in upper management, speaking from being on the demand planning battlefield, advising those in attendance to stick to the facts and the numbers, must have been very encouraging to those in attendance. Wachtel’s said you have to have courage to prevail in this field.

As gorgeous as the weather was and as serene as the resort had been, the speaker’s messages shined upon the attendees. Lessons were learned, relationships were made, and people were inspired.

I want to offer a public word of thanks to all the speakers for volunteering their time and showing our attendees the way to be strong forecasting and planning professionals.

At the end, it wasn’t so much about receiving “therapy”, but being inspired, learning best practices, and knowing we’re not alone in our journey to improve forecasting and planning performance.

How will you inspire your team to have courage and prevail?

Constance Korol
Director of Marketing
Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning

Join Us at Our Next Event:

Island Harvest, Long Island, NY

Here in the US, Thanksgiving is upon us, as we prepare to celebrate together with family and friends sharing a feast and give thanks for what we have.

Unfortunately, there is a growing number of people that struggle to feed themselves and their families every day. Statistics listed this past October showed that Long Island, our local community, is home to a staggering 285,000 people that face hunger every day.  Long Island Newsday, our popular local news source, recently posted that a local food bank charity called Island Harvest, has received a 68 percent increase in Thanksgiving meal requests from its 570 member agencies. This is an influx that the organization is not prepared to handle as we are now only a couple of days away from Thanksgiving and they are still short on food.

We at the IBF feel that no one should go hungry, especially during the Holiday Season and that is why we made a financial contribution to Island Harvest on behalf of our association. Local not-for-profit organizations such as Island Harvest benefit not only from contributions but also through exposure and the raised awareness that comes from word of mouth. During this holiday season, we would like to encourage you to take a moment to find out about charities in your area. Find one that is in line with your beliefs and give them a shout out on your network.

On behalf of the whole IBF family, we wish you a wonderful week and a Happy Thanksgiving to our friends in the US.

-CK

Keynote Speaker Cliff Engle, SVP Fender Musical Instruments Corporation at the 2010 BOTB Conference

And of course, no one will be able to bring up the 2010 Best of the Best S&OP Conference without mentioning the outstanding performance by well known guitarist Greg Koch along with his Fender colleagues during the IBM/Cognos cocktail reception. I cannot think of the last time I was at a business event, where I heard someone in the audience yell “Free Bird” while I was speaking on stage. As if that was not enough, Fender was incredibly generous to the BOTB attendees and gave away a guitar! It was truly over the top.

Through IBF’s collaboration with the APICS team, we have formed an event unlike any other. The meshing of these two organizations, which are passionate about delivering educational yet fun events in order to grow the field of supply chain and demand planning has resulted in the production of a high level and memorable event. I feel that our speakers have communicated an overall sense of enthusiasm and support for their fellow industry professionals. We were fortunate to be able to lasso this group together in the name of offering professionals the knowledge they need to go back to the office and create change.

Check out flip video footage here on the IBF Demand Planning You Tube Channel:

Constance Korol is the Senior Marketing Manager for the Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning (IBF). Follow her and the IBF team on Twitter: http://twitter.com/demandplanning

Photo credit to Hwa Kim, Photographer, APICS

Constance Korol

I have been following Jeff Ashcroft’s informative tweets and interacting with him for some time now even though we never actually met in person prior to last month.  It was at the IBF booth at the APICS annual conference last month when Jeff approached us unassumingly. As soon as I looked up and saw Jeff, I said “I know you! I know you from Twitter” Jeff immediately responded by saying “No one has ever said that to me before”. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world.

Last week, Jeff was cordial enough to spend some time with me, providing insight on his work experiences and how he sees social media as playing a role within Supply Chain organizations.

CK: Tell us a little about yourself. How long have you been working in Supply Chain & Demand Planning and how did you get started?

JA: When I retire I am going to write a book called “I Fell into Logistics” which is what happened.  Following part time work at The Hudson’s Bay Company distribution centre I graduated during a major recession and needed a full time role as I was getting married that year. From there I moved through to top logistics job over a 15 year career learning by experience all along the way.  After the corporate VP role I was grooming for was eliminated, I left HBC to join Tibbett & Britten Group a major early mover in North American third party logistics.

As 3PL was new to North America at that time, the business grew rapidly from 20,000 sq ft of distribution space to over 20 million in five short years.  Most of these were major retail DC operations with the most notable being the creation of Wal-Mart’s coast to coast Distribution & Transportation operations across Canada in 1994 supporting their successful entry into the country. After leaving TBG I started my own consulting firm Strategic Logistics Partners providing many services in traditional logistics consulting as well as facilitating leading edge end-to-end multi company supply chain initiatives.  I moved these projects into PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2005 as Vice President Logistics/Supply Chain and Retail Advisory Leader for Canada over the following two years.  Strategic Logistics Partners continues to provide a variety of services to all levels of the supply chain and has taken an active role in the development & use of social media in the supply chain profession.

CK: When and how did you first enter the world of Social Media? How has it helped in your career thus far?

JA: Depending on how you define social media, you could say it goes all the way back to 1995 when I launched my first website Logistics World where I “blogged” before the term was even coined. In 1999 I built and launched the About.com Logistics/Supply Chain site with many community features through a Discussion Forum, weekly Newsletter and interactive chats held on a regular basis with key industry folks generating tens of thousands of page views per week.  In 2004 was when I first began using LinkedIn which was again before anyone used the term social media, but it was a very useful “networking” tool and also allowed you to always find a contact name for any company you wished to approach, a very useful tool in sales.

However, within a year of the acquisition of About.com by The New York Times I left the About.com site and created Supply Chain Network www.supplychainnetwork.com which continues today as a successful logistics blogzine site with a weekly SCN Newsbrief newsletter. Additionally in 2008 Green Supply Chain Network www.greenscn.com was launched to allow us to cope with the volume of information being generated in regards to green logistics and supply chain management and discuss the associated issues we now all face. In addition to the blogging, use of both LinkedIn and now extensively Twitter.

On the career side, I have found that LinkedIn allows me to be a better networker than if I was to work without it. For example, over my career I have met , interacted and worked with many people who are constantly moving and by being “out there” on LinkedIn allows those people I’ve either lost touch with or decide they need to reach out to me to find and reconnect with me more rapidly and easily than through conventional means.

CK: What social media networks do you utilize and which do you feel is the most engaging?

JA: As noted above, the two I use most and most frequently are Linked In and Twitter. There are many, many, many social media sites and services out there and my feeling is if you try and use them all, you will drown and potentially not be effective on any of them.

On LinkedIn I now have   2,116 direct connections, 706,600+ 2^nd level, 12,839,100 3^rd level for a total potential introduction reach of 13,547,800 people.  And one of the most important features and functions of LinkedIn is the Groups function where I run 10 Groups and belong to 40 more. Specifically relevant to IBF folks would be the SCN Inventory Management Group http://ow.ly/FkD1 , the Vendor Managed Inventory Group http://ow.ly/FkyI and the overall  SCN Supply Chain Network Group http://ow.ly/FkDv .

On Twitter now across all my supply chain and logistics related accounts I have a total Followed of 16,100 and 12,200 Followers and the growth of these is accelerating as the total number of Twitter users grows and also as more and more logistics & supply chain professionals join Twitter.  Some of the relevant Twitter accounts I utilize that would be of interest are:

@supplychainntwk

@Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCSCO

@TheSocialCPO

@TheSocialCLO

Some of the uses of Twitter are mentioned in the ISM article however one big benefit which every individual should capitalize on is the ability to leverage use, position and activity in social media in order to enhance your role and status within organizations. The early adopters in this case have much to gain over laggards who insist in keeping their heads in the sand when it comes to engaging in the social media world and do this at their own peril.

Now also emerging is Google Wave which basically allows you to track waves of communication threads from across all social networks and have more immediate chat type discussions. Initially it looks like Twitter on steroids, but I am still evaluating if it will get a long term place in my social media toolkit.

CK: How do you feel social media has changed the face of the Demand Planning Field and how do you feel it will effect the field in the future?”

JA: Yes I certainly do feel there will be major impacts and these will relate initially to increased communication and collaboration up and down supply chains and the breaking down of the silos between functional areas and between trading partners, carriers and all stakeholders and actors.

There are a number of other supply chain uses and implications and rather than restate them all here, it is easier to direct you to my Social Media in the Supply Chain article recently published in the ISM’s Inside Supply Management publication.  http://ow.ly/u2mn

If social media evolves as it currently appears, it could also become a great medium for consumer demand sensing, especially for new products which are very difficult to manage.     And for all products there is no doubt that getting an earlier demand signal can be very valuable. Also, there are an untold number of neural network inputs which will now become more readily and cost effectively available through social media channels that can be integrated into making forecasting even more accurate in the future.

CK: Do you have any recommendations for those new to demand planning and or social media?

JA: Get on with it!! Don’t waste another day wondering what the value will be, the value is there, it is real and the sooner you get on these networks and acclimatized to them, the sooner you and your organization will be in a position to reap the benefits. Get the jump on both your co-workers and competitors so you are working from a position of information strength. What this is all about is communication, communication, communication one thing I think most will agree that there is not enough of in the world today which leads to many of the problems we face in supply chains.

CK: Jeff, thanks again for your time in sharing social ideas in the supply chain.

IBF moderates conversations happening on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. The global networks are growing every day.  Join the conversation if you have not done so already.  I look forward to seeing you online as well as onsite at an upcoming event.

Constance Korol

As we ease out of crisis mode and plan for more stable waters, we find ourselves asking  how  can we take advantage of the upturn, and what will it take to do so? Going back to my undergraduate days of pursuing my degree in Education makes me think of the structure of a lesson plan.  The lesson plan clearly identifies the mission statement, goals and objectives, for both the long and short-term. This brings to the forefront the questions of where to obtain the resources, the drive, and best practices to implement this plan. Lastly, of course, would be to determine a way to track and measure the results in order to evaluate the successes or shortcomings of this lesson plan. Common questions that professionals find themselves asking at this stage usually include:  Where do I start? What should be my primary focus? What areas need the most work, and how do I communicate this to others?  Let’s start with something that health care professionals refer to as a SOAP note or:

Subjective

Objective

Assessment

Plan.

The “S” stands for subjective and is defined by Wikipedia as, “The patient’s current condition in narrative form. The history or state of experienced symptoms are recorded in the patient’s own words. It will include all pertinent and negative symptoms under review of body systems.” If we translate this to business conditions, we must describe the state of affairs using our own words. For example, “Our team that produces the forecast continues to struggle, especially with today’s greater variation in demand.  This contributes to our company’s cash flow troubles and as a result, we  continue to lose customers for some products due to out of stocks.   For other products, much of our money is tied up into inventory that is slow to sell?”

Going back to our Healthcare example, the next letter in our acronym is “O” or objective. The objective component includes:

• Vital signs
• Findings from physical examinations, such as posture, bruising, and abnormalities
• Results from laboratory tests
• Measurements, such as age and weight of the patient.

This is where you stick to the facts, and only the facts. In business terms you may ask, “What is the company’s current forecast accuracy on an aggregate and SKU level by location, inventory levels, customer fulfillment rates, orders, shipments, and other important data and metrics. Also, is there a consensus process or silo based forecasting process?   If there is a consensus forecast, is it being used or overridden?”  First you need to jot all the facts down, no matter how nasty and terrible they may look.

Then there is “A” which stands for assessment. This is a quick summary of the patient’s main symptoms and diagnosis including a differential diagnosis, a list of other possible diagnoses, usually in order of most to least likely. Translating this back to our business example would lead to answers such as,  “Our forecast error is high because there is no input from sales and marketing.”  “There are no incentives in place to improve the forecast and no reward structure.” Or, “upper management does not use the baseline forecasts, where instead they create an unvalidated goal as the forecast.” Furthermore, those with forecasting responsibilities are not certified and properly trained for the task at hand.” Think of this area as the broken rib that is causing internal bleeding throughout the body. Once addressed, the body as a whole will start to heal and run at a normal pace. Find the broken rib at your company.

So now we have reached the “P” or the point of laying out your  plan. The lesson plan, with goals and objectives which will empower team members by sharpening the tools needed for achievement. This is not the easy part in health care or business. It takes time, research, and patience.  There may be a need for many revisions in addition to utilizing networks such as the IBF Membership Network for advice.  The lesson plan is not only for you, but for your team as well. What will you teach your team in your weekly meetings?  What will they be teaching you? At the end of this journey, you should be able to teach a whole community the lessons that you have learned and developed as best practices. Collectively we’re living through a very tough economic time, and together, we can still document our rough patches, lessons learned, as well as accomplishments, all for a greater good for the company and our professional careers.

Therefore, starting with a pen and napkin, then moving over to the computer and opening up a blank word document, you can develop a lesson plan for yourself and team that can ensure no opportunity is lost as the market comes back to life.  Then, perhaps by New Years, we will not have a hangover experience, but an experience of celebration.

Constance Korol
Senior Marketing Manager
Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning

Constance Korol

The Global Neighborhood of demand planners and forecasting professionals is coming together. Conversations and discussions are happening throughout the world and answers/ comments to common challenges are being addressed in forums.   Since 1981, the IBF has educated and trained this community through publications, events, newsletters , membership benefits and certification.  Now more than ever, professionals with a common interest are listening and being heard through social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.

A few weeks ago, two discussions on the IBF Linkedin group began to swell and became quite popular in the weeks to follow. This led me to ask two of our long time supporters and seasoned practitioners to participate in a webcast, which aired live on June 3^rd and will be available shortly on demand. Mark Lawless, a Senior Consultant for the IBF spoke on Improving Forecasting Performance in Order to Improve the Quality of Business Decisions and Jeff Marthins of TastyKake put his own CSI twist on  S&OP, a case study.

The overall message put forth by the webcast was that forecasting is where success in business all begins.  Our two presenters showed the importance of having the right forecasting model and the right team in place to stand behind the forecast which can ultimately result in greater chance for success. By now we have all heard that upper management support for the Sales and Operations Planning process is key. However, Jeff also pointed out that having a champion to carry out the process is also just as important.  Plus, bring the right data to the meeting is crucial as well.

It takes work and effort to support what you do and what you believe in.  A community that faces the same challenges and engages those issues collaboratively can be motivational and can help overcome obstacles.  Learning and sharing ideas can help prevent another lesson learned of Failed S&OP.  The old saying goes: “If you are a forecaster you will always be wrong.”  I would like to think forecasting morphed into something more sophisticated, providing the best answer, supported by an educated group, that drives quality in making a business decision.

See for yourself! Download the slide deck from the Mini Tutorial here.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/constancek