The keys to enabling Response Management
By Dave Haskins, Executive Vice President of Development
Since Response Management is all about empowering people to respond rapidly to changing circumstances, there are some underlying technology requirements critical to making this happen.
First, to promote broad adoption and provide value to all the people that need to be involved in responding to changes, you need a familiar, flexible spreadsheet-paradigm with real-time ‘what-if’ scenarios. You want the user community to be able to determine the impact of any change in demand, supply, capacity or product and to be able to do so at any process point and immediately see the impact on all levels of the business.
Given today’s global supply chains and emphasis on specialization, you have to have both internal and external users participate in the evaluation of alternative responses to a given circumstance. And, you need to arm these people with a scorecarding capability that evaluates alternative responses against business metrics.
Such an approach eliminates the traditional weaknesses of today’s favored solution - the spreadsheet (its amazing how frequently we replace spreadsheets). It ensures a consistent view of multi-enterprise data spanning all layers of the planning process. It includes complex manufacturing analytics (e.g. MRP, CRP, etc.) and powerful scenario management enables cross-enterprise collaboration.
It’s the unique combination of these capabilities (you can see more here) that really change the way organizations can respond to change and we’ve seen it be successful time and again at some of the world’s leading companies.
