A next generation solution for planning, forward-looking performance analysis, and decision management to continuously synchronize and align demand and supply

Synchronization of Sales and Marketing with Operations is Critical to Business Success
Businesses and their supply chains have grown increasingly complex over the past several years. Supply chain networks today consist of many different trading partners ranging from global suppliers and manufacturing partners to transportation and logistics providers all striving to meet the uncertain demand of customers across expansive global locations.  Getting the right product at the right place in today’s dynamic marketplace is no longer a trivial feat.  The days are over when sales and marketing simply adjusted demand forecasts periodically and “tossed them over the wall” to manufacturing.  Increased customer expectations, market competition, and demand volatility have created a tremendous need for robust planning processes.  Client stories regarding sales and operations planning (S&OP) initiatives that failed to yield any benefits or savings, or worse yet failed altogether are not uncommon.  No longer can businesses afford to miss customer commitments or write-off excess inventory.  In order to be successful in today’s competitive market, operational excellence is imperative.

The Financial Impact of S&OP Decisions
The supply chain functional areas in most organizations today are traditionally focused on volume (i.e. units/quantity) as are most supply chain software offerings in the market. However, failing to give consideration to the financial impact of supply chain decisions often leads to sub-optimal business results. Symphony Metreo FS&OP Manager is designed to handle both units and dollars and enables the financial impact and analysis component of decisions so often missing from operations. As a result, all functions of the business can now work from a single set of numbers, and see the both the financial as well as volume impact of their decisions across the business.

Symphony Metreo is the leading technology enabler of MTNA(TM) based solutions, and is personally endorsed by Mark Payne, author of “Make the Numbers, Don’t Chase The Numbers.”

Understand Future Inventory Positions and Impact
FS&OP Manager aligns the entire organization, making it easier for operations to formulate responses to the market, competitive pressures, and unexpected events that further the strategic goals of the enterprise. It monitors the events affecting forward supply and demand, and highlights the changes that have the most significant impact on corporate targets. FS&OP Manager puts advanced analytics and modeling capabilities into the hands of operations decision-makers, capabilities that allow them to monitor performance in real time, model decisions in a collaborative process-with sales and marketing, supply chain, and finance-and execute decisions to internal systems with write-back capabilities.

Improve operational efficiency and effectiveness:

• Improve operational performance by understanding financial impact of supply chain decisions
• Predict needed inventory levels more accurately-reducing excess inventory and expedited freight charges and improving customer service
• Smooth production signals to suppliers and manufacturers
• Reduce expedited freight
• Reduce planning cycle time
• React to unforeseen events and demand changes in real time
• Improve demand forecasting accuracy
• Automate current fragmented and manual process to leave more time for value-added analysis, planning and decision management

Scenario Analysis and Collaboration

FS&OP Manager brings truly differentiated capabilities to predicting future performance. The unified enterprise-level analytic model allows immediate simulation to compare the impact of multiple scenarios, across functions. Scenario templates help automate frequently performed analyses and planning procedures. Users can share and collaborate on the same live scenario. Scenario version control ensures edits are accepted only where desired. Key capabilities include:

• Projections - the solution can be used to predict a trend by extending current time-based data forward. Several often-used forecasting and smoothing algorithms are provided, or you can use your own preferred methods.
• Collaboration - share live scenario models for joint cross-functional problem solving and issue resolution. Seamless integration with standard email systems
• ScenarioFlow - guide users through each step of the operations planning workflow - using a set of configurable analysis workflow templates
• Advanced Analysis - support for all the well-known analysis capabilities, e.g., drilling, pivot, drag-n-drop rows and columns, hide/show dimensions, and more

Ease of Use - Built for the Business User
Symphony Metreo solutions are built for maximum ease of use and quick configuration with minimal or no IT support. A well-designed and innovative user interface (UI) with extensive use of "wizards" and templates allows for self-service report generation. This UI makes users productive with minimal training and no need to redesign current business processes. Examples of such user configurable areas include personal homepage, folders, dashboards, alerts, and templates used for reports and scenarios.

Powerful Decision Management Capabilities
FS&OP Manager enables companies to automate the end-to-end business process of analysis, decision review and approval, through to actual execution. Completed scenario analyses can be submitted as a decision for review and approval routing. Managers and other business owners can review, compare, and prioritize specific decisions to ensure the right decisions are implemented, in the right sequence. The solution helps track decision status and also maintains an audit trail on each decision as approvals are completed. Users can also go back to review previous decisions, see the assumptions that were made, understand the impact of the decision, and use past decisions to guide and improve current ones.

Superior Scalability and Manageability
Symphony Metreo solutions such as S&OP Manager require minimal effort to deploy and manage. These solutions are deployed on a multi-tier server architecture using industry standard application server and database infrastructure. Server components can reside on one or several machines. Key capabilities include:

• High performance — Multi-tier processing and automatic load balancing, ensures that deployments can scale to thousands of users
• Zero-footprint web interface — a web user interface designed for maximum ease-of-use while still offering essential power capabilities for interactive chart and report manipulation
• Security — Based on user roles, administrators can restrict access to measures, dimensions, members, as well as individual modules of the application. User management can also be linked up with standard LDAP servers for deployment across large enterprises

Download the FS&OP Manager Data Sheet