Michael Anderson

John Becker

Monday, 8:05am: your boss calls you into his office and says, “I just got back from the Supply Chain Forecasting & Planning Conference.  We need to start a S&OP process!”  He hands you a 9 inch thick textbook and barks “get it going!!.”

So you dutifully read the textbook, gather your team, collate the data, and have your first S&OP meeting.  It is a resounding and utter . . . failure.  “This data isn’t correct, the sales are off by $1.35!, that’s 0.002%”  “What do I care about OEM capacity, I have a trade show next week!”  “I don’t have time for another meeting, I have work to do!”  Sound familiar?  It does to us, as we lived this nightmare twice.

However, we lived to tell this tale, and currently have a solid but basic S&OP process in place at Fender Musical Instrument Corporation.  Furthermore, we are on the path to implement a full-fledged S&OP process across our organization including subsidiaries and over-seas offices.

In Phoenix at the IBF Conference on Feb 22-23, we will offer some insights into what to do when the best laid plans fail; how we learned from our mistakes, changed tactics, and ultimately got on the right track.  We will discuss how we won over a management team who had lost faith in our data, a sales organization who were indifferent to our efforts, and a marketing team who didn’t realize that S&OP could help them in their effort to create the “Spirit of Rock n’ Roll.”  Please bring questions and your own war stories of successes and failures from the S&OP front.

Of course, we welcome hearing your S&OP challenges here too!

John Becker
VP of Global Supply Chain Planning
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation

Mike Anderson
Manager of Global Demand Forecasting
Fender Musical Instruments Corporation

See JOHN BECKER & MICHAEL ANDERSON from FENDER Speak in Phoenix at IBF’S:

$695 USD for Conference Only!

February 22-23, 2010
Phoenix, Arizona USA