From my experience in various MTO environments such as the Aerospace and Communications industries the Sales and Marketing departments have a reluctance to forecast business activity.  There are three main reasons for this:

• They feel that it is difficult or impossible to estimate what a customer is likely to do, and if they did, the result would not be that accurate.
• If they came up with an estimate, that would then become the target by which their sales performance would be measured.
• Forecasting takes time and resources and sales people would prefer to be using that time in getting in front of prospective customers and creating sales.

While being sympathetic with their position this reluctance to forecast creates problems throughout the organization that they may not be aware of, particularly in the supply side of the organization concerned with Planning and Purchasing.

Now let us take a look at the result of this decision.  Demand management is a major input to the Sales and Operations process which balances demand and supply, so resulting from this there is only information coming from the sales orders being received and there is no visibility into the future.

The Sales and Operations process is an input to the Master Production Scheduling (MPS) process and then onto the Material Requirements Planning (MRP) Process.  The objective of an MRP process is to plan for lower level components and to have them in place when needed.

Customers, as we know, are demanding ever shorter lead times, and If a sales forecast is not in place, then the only way the Planners and Purchasers can have material in place when it is needed is to actually do the necessary forecasting for the lower level components.

So two things have occurred here and neither is good.

• The sales organization has shifted the responsibility for producing forecasts to the Planners and Buyers. The organization that is in constant contact with customers and has a feel for the market place has abdicated the forecasting responsibility to the Planner and Buyers who have little or no contact with the customers and no real feel for the market place in which the organization is operating.
• Following on from that the only way the Planners and Buyers can forecast is simply to look in the rear-view mirror and assume that history will be a predictor of the future, and we know how inaccurate that can be. In most cases a historical review will be done and a method, such as a moving average will be employed, resulting in the wrong set of people producing the forecast and using a less-than-optimal method to do it.

It then gets even worse.  Because the Planning and Purchasing departments are part of operations their overriding concern is to make certain that there is sufficient inventory for Production to make what it needs.  Thus there is a tendency for the Buyer to order more than is necessary, a safety stock usually well in excess of what demand and supply fluctuations would dictate.  This is often exacerbated by the fact that the Buyer also needs to compensate for the manufacturing yield losses that may not be set up in the manufacturing Bill of Materials (BOM).  Add to that vendor lot-sizing and minimum order quantities and you have what most MTO companies have; an excessive inventory of component parts and no real idea of exactly how it happened.  Then comes the emails from the Finance department and Senior Management, and I think everyone knows how this plays out.

So, what is the solution?  In spite of their protestations, Sales must understand that a forecast has to be completed on a regular basis (at least once a month) and that they are the best positioned people in the organization to do it.  It is understood that a forecast will not be perfect but it will be the best that the organization can come up with, and also, as the body of knowledge tells us, some kind of forecast is better than no forecast at all.  A far-sighted organization will ensure that the no sales person is disadvantaged by providing a forecast, even when that forecast is compared against actual events (as it should be).

One this small, but absolutely essential, piece of the jigsaw puzzle is in place, everything else will fall into place.   The Sales and Operations process will become more effective as the Demand Management improves, this will ensure a more robust Master Production Scheduling, and the resultant MRP process will be more accurate and better controlled.

This will improve the planning of these lower level components which will in turn reduce the level of inventory of these components.

EPSON

The Sales and Operations process is not well understood in many companies.  The information that is collected by the Sales department is often inaccurate and incomplete, because unfortunately forecasting and gathering data is not the first priority of a sales department, but rather done as a necessary evil and an afterthought.

However, if it is not done well, and the Operations personnel have little confidence in the data, various things will happen that will denigrate the company’s ability to have the right quantity of the right stock at the right time.  The following case study illustrates this point.

Situation

Epson had their distribution warehouse, their production facility, and their Sales/Marketing operation in three different locations.  They were having difficulty keeping the optimum amount of inventory in their distribution warehouse.  This resulted in back orders and low customer fill rates.

The major issues revolved around their forecasting operation and how it provided information to the production facility, and their sales and operations process as a whole.

Analysis found that there was a disconnect between the forecast information and how that information was being used at the production facility.  In addition, forecast error was not being measured correctly and management had a more optimistic view of the forecasting effort that was actually warranted.  There was also “gaming” involved by the Sales operation in that they added a certain percentage to the forecast to encourage the production facility to hit the target rates.

This resulted in a bigger disconnect between Sales and Operations as the separate production entity would not have the required confidence in the forecasts and thus would begin to chase sales rather than adhere to the forecast.

This was compounded by the fact that each entity had their own disparate system, which remained out of balance with the other two despite IT’s efforts to interface them.  There was always a timing difference between the systems, and even if this was only one day, it meant that people were always looking at different figures which also had an adverse effect on confidence.

Approach

The first item achieved was the removal of the forecast bias along with the correct calculation and publication of the forecast error that began to improve the forecasting techniques and give the production facility more confidence putting together their build schedules.

The second item was to set up a formal Sales and Operations process that kept forecasts in line with production schedules and moved the responsibility for the inventory levels from Production to Sales/Marketing.

The third item was a complete analysis of their disparate systems situation so that management understood the cost in lack of visibility of not having a comprehensive Distributed Requirements Planning (DSP) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Result

In a 4-month time frame the company was able to significantly improve its back order situation and its customer fill rates.  There was also a foundation in place for future improvements, as they now had a good forecasting method and measurement, along with a more cohesive alignment of production and forecasting resulting from the Sales and Operations process.