Chairperson’s Remarks

David P. Sievers Principal and Global Consumer Practice Leader Archstone Consulting

Drilling Deeper Into Onsite Retailer Relationships To Reduce Product Development Lead Time, Cut Costs And Optimize Inventory

Jason Reiman Senior Director, Sales and Operations Planning The Hershey Company

In a high impulse category like confection, Hershey’s has to work closely with its retailers to ensure that they don’t run out of those all-important chocolates. Jason Reiman is responsible for maintaining Hershey’s privileged relationships with major stores and his prime focus is on reducing out-of-stocks. He has fine-tuned these links to be able to redeploy his inventory where it’s needed most. Part of the key to Hershey’s model is an integrated planning approach which incorporates retail movement and channel inventories into the finished goods and production plans. This has led to store in-stock levels surpassing customer expectations, the fine result of a continued focus on improving service, reducing costs and lowering inventory.

• Ensuring your onsite staff work with senior-level retail merchandisers, buyers, and replenishment teams
• Utilizing this relationship to collect scorecard data directly from stores as often as possible
• Communicating this key information back through your organization; ensuring it gets to your forecasters first
• Utilizing the data to understand product development timelines
• Ultimately reducing product development lead times to cut costs and optimize inventory

Effectively Balancing Extensive IT Implementations With Daily Operations

Rosanne Megrath Director, Customer Logistics Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade

When a company embarks on an Enterprise Resource Planning system rollout it’s usually all hands on deck. Senior staff are taken by critical strategic vision-making activities as they identify how long they need this new piece of string. Without the commitment of upper management to building the framework of a new IT architecture, your long-term company goals can’t be properly realized. Your leadership’s expert knowledge is imperative to this often costly and timeconsuming exercise. But what happens to the day-to-day work still required while the new systems are being designed? How can a company ensure that service levels remain high if managers can’t be present to oversee the highly detailed work of their operations staff?

• Realizing that rolling out a new ERP system will be a long haul
• Understanding that senior management’s full engagement with the process is of utmost importance to your company’s long-term goals
• Accepting that this is a company-wide dilemma and not solely related to your own business unit
• Weighing up the pros and cons of engaging extra temporary staff who, through no fault of their own, will not have the knowledge bank required to confidently complete tasks with the attention to detail you require
• Learning to balance the time spent in strategic planning with maintaining a firm grasp on the daily activities of your business

Coffee And Refreshments In The Solutions Zone

Panel Discussion: What Must Companies Start Doing Today To Plan For The Possible Future?

	Tony Quartararo Executive Vice President, Supply Chain Burt’s Bees
	Rich Hubli Vice President – Operations Strategy Development Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages
	Roger Sklar Director of Inbound Supply Chain Operations Nike
	Scott Craig Director of Supply Chain Services Hannaford Brothers Company

While all companies must, by design, concentrate their attention on the daily pressures of current business activity, some are taking the decision to step back a little and consider what kind of world we will inhabit in the long-term future. How can we start to build a supply chain infrastructure to be responsive to the many global changes that lie ahead? Supply chain leaders from a number of industries share their thoughts on their companies’ distant planning.

• Designing a long-term business plan
• Realizing that what we imagine for the future will, in all likelihood, not happen
• Building scenarios for what could happen and calculating the possible risks for your business, taking into account the following:
• Aging demographics
• Energy and rising oil prices
• Environmental regulation
• Consumer demand
• Technology
• Congestion and deteriorating infrastructure
• Security
• Using these risks to help plan your company's strategic direction for the next 3-5 years
• Imagining what the world will look like in 13 years and working backwards to help inform your business planning
• Emerging better prepared for unforeseen challenges

Surviving The Potentially Painful Process Of Organizational Mergers And Acquisitions And Coming Out On Top With An Enhanced Supply Chain

Gregg Schweir Director, Supply Chain Operations Whirlpool Corporation

When Whirlpool purchased Maytag in 2005, it was regarded as a promising fit, as analysts viewed an even balance of steady-hand management, innovative spirit and encouragement for employees to share creative business ideas. Matched with a reputation for being a leader in diversity and promoting from within, the acquisition was heralded as a new age for these two strong performers. Since then, Whirlpool’s staff have been responsible for integrating the Maytag brand, with a focus on the sales organization and information systems. And now for the heavy lifting: by the end of 2008, the manufacturing and distribution units will be consolidated, as warehouses and production plants are merged with the Whirlpool system. The simple final goal? One shipment, one invoice, one order. Gregg takes us through this comprehensive process.

• Accepting from the outset that the process of integrating another company’s supply chain into your own will be at times confusing, frustrating and long
• Remembering that your customers’ sales experience is of utmost importance and their interaction with the company should be affected as little as possible
• Identifying altered distribution needs within the new structure
• Should warehouses and distribution centers be realigned? If so, what is the impact on freight considerations?
• Could the merged companies function with each party’s discrete transport structures, incorporating both 3PL and in-house trucking or must they be absorbed into one system?
• Overcoming the people management challenges of integration, responding to staff needs and fears following a takeover and maximizing leadership opportunities in your expanded company
• Minimizing the burden of new product integration to the operating sector by accepting that one size does not always fit all – some SKUs may take longer and could necessitate retaining the previous company’s existing system in the shortterm
• Understanding that the more change you go through the better you’ll be at dealing with change

Chairperson’s Remarks

Beginning With The End In Mind – Developing A Long-Term Strategy By Understanding Where You Want To Be At Plan’s End: A Retailer’s Perspective

Scott Craig Director of Supply Chain Services Hannaford Brothers Company

Hannaford has its eye on the future. The supermarket chain is looking forward to see what the industry and consumer will look like in eight to ten years. On a concrete level for Scott Craig, this means finding new ways to anticipate demand, specifically through computer-assisted ordering in several store categories. He and his team have taken the time to feel comfortable that their systems and processes can support the new software and they’re now enjoying the benefits of a smooth rollout – improved sales, reduced inventory and out-of-stocks.

• Establishing your 5- and 10-year goals - Developing your long-term strategy to fit each goal
• Understanding how to target different initiatives or processes to get to the end game - Asking what types of IT infrastructure you need
• Understanding what kind of physical network you need
• What are the things that we’ll need to change to evolve to that end state?
• Understanding that the first version of any long-term forecast is guaranteed to be wrong
• Creating flexible options for yourself to meet the change that happens within your enterprise and around your organization

Supporting Corporate Innovation Through The Supply Chain

Susan Zayas Director Supply Chain Innovation Jack in the Box Inc.

The restaurant business has had to tighten its belt of late. Rising prices of raw material have led to cost-cutting elsewhere and the Jack in the Box supply chain has been attempting to mitigate some of this extra burden by streamlining. Susan Zayas’ challenge is to retain agility and continue to support the business efficiently and effectively during times of change. In this session, learn from a hands-on expert how to balance being lean and agile at the same time.

• Maintaining the ability to change in a cost-cutting environment
• Modeling new product impacts to the supply chain prior to their launch
• Assessing supply chain risks in a new product environment
• Optimizing supply chain impact on new product introductions
• Effectively managing vendor relationships in this highly specified industry
• Key supplier collaboration on products and supply chain logistics
• Assessing strategies along the supply chain including fleet and distribution center management options
• Benchmarking non-proprietary logistics

Coffee And Refreshments In The Solutions Zone

Shifting Sales And Operations Planning Forecasting From Séance To Success

Nick Delany President VTech Communications

Sometimes it feels like the sales planning manager is wishing for a clairvoyant when building the next forecast. Sitting alone with historical shipments and running algorithms to come up with a prediction can be time consuming and also simply inaccurate. Mavericks like VTech take their S&OP process straight to their retailers to jointly develop the retail point-of-sale forecast. When calculated against the retailers on-hand and targeted ending inventory levels, VTech can make a simple computation to identify how much the client really needs, reducing much of the cosmic guesswork that often goes with forecasting. The result? VTech is the best-in-class vendor in their category with the major retailers.

• Understanding that the starting point is the retailer
• Adjusting to meet the demands at the retail level by working backwards into the entire organization
• Monitoring fill rates and point-of-sale data regularly with the retailer, where those metrics exist
• Working in close partnership with retailers’ buyers to ensure their own sales forecasting and promotional planning is accurate
• Integrating the retail replenishment plan process into your organization

Solving Out-Of-Stock At The Shelf

J.P. Brackman Global Retail Presence Manager Procter & Gamble

The challenge of resolving shelf out-of-stocks, while reducing inventories in an environment of SKU proliferation, for many consumer goods companies is a problem that is complex and as unsolvable as squaring the circle. However, Procter and Gamble (P&G) has taken a fresh approach to the issue. In this session, J.P. Brackman, P&G’s leading expert on out-of-stocks with over 22 years in on-shelf management and operations, will describe how P&G has adopted leading edge technology and processes to drive forward on-shelf availability in the store. J.P. will share details of P&G’s approach and the results of the program, focusing on:

• How P&G leverages retailer downstream data to better understand the root cause of out-of-stocks
• How P&G uses leading edge science to predict out-of-stocks before they even happen
• How multiple functions in the supply chain, and not only store merchandisers, can help prevent and resolve out-of-stocks