At the Consumer Electronics Supply Chain Academy 2008, the panel called “Manufacturers’ and Distributors’ Roundtable: Supply Chain is Everyone’s Business,” will bring to light issues surrounding the main topic of how to successfully execute integration of sales and marketing with operations and the supply chain.

A panelist at the roundtable, Jack Watson will be contributing his perspective on the need for a solid foundation to support automated replenishment solutions. He’ll be speaking from experience, as his position at Motorola requires him to direct Global Customer Solutions.

Watson and his team at Motorola have been working on programs to collaborate with their customers and has implemented fully orchestrated Moto managed inventory programs. With a basis of CPFR (Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment), the next evolution is called eVCAM: Visibility, CPFR, Analytics, and Monitoring and alerts. “Monitoring and alerts offers the ability to walk in today and know what the key issues and opportunities are with the customer,” said Watson. “That’s the area I’m interested in.” Improving demand and the ability to respond in real time are key areas. Watson is interested to hear how others are doing this at the roundtable, and how partners jointly link to improve product availability in a collaborative process.

Part of the analytics piece of the eVCAM vision is getting the right data for decision support tools. In this way a company can do their sensing and shaping of the demand—the marketing piece. Following up to that are then the responses to the demand. “I think we’re all marketers,” said Watson. “People don’t realize that.” 

For Watson, it’s a team approach with the appropriate customer rationalization that makes the right decision in multiple industries. Regarding profitability, Watson said, “We’re finding in many industries that it’s important to align resources and business processes with key top customers. Concentrating on results, understanding cost to serve will dramatically improve business focus and operations performance.”

Part of business model and sales and operations planning is the fact that a few key customers contribute the majority of sales. These key accounts are an area of focus for customer caring, planning and execution teams. “The key customers are where we need to improve both visibility and our ability to ensure that the information and demand plan is roughly right rather than precisely wrong,” said Watson. He will discuss some ways to stay aware of the big buying accounts so that they are driving the course of business practices rather than falling victim to the squeaky wheel syndrome.

Watson’s background includes a rare combination of work experiences. He has implemented ERP systems, lead lean supply chain transformation, value added customer solutions, and managed sourcing and commodity management teams. Having also worked in sales, he knows how to close deals and determine where customer contracts impact delivery penalties of customer scorecards and how they integrate into the supply chain scorecards.

“That’s what’s exciting about what I do,” he said. “I’ve been able to quickly assess, work on, and deliver great solutions with the important ability to prioritize.” Globally everybody is fighting for the same resources. Watson’s team has implemented several dozen customer solution and foundational projects this year. “We always have more in the hopper and many did not make the cut,” he said. “The need to go through our solutions funnel and prioritize based on business case, customer prioritization, funds, resources, and our readiness helped us with our ability to delivery solutions.”

One of the concepts requiring priority status is the foundation of a formalized data-capture system. AMR Research, the leading research firm focused on the intersection of business processes with value chain and enterprise technologies, calls this a Demand Signal Repository. It is necessary for a business to offer the ability to support appropriate data capture and support analysis for complete visibility, forecasting and collaboration across the trading community. “I think most companies underestimate the importance of building a Demand Signal Repository,” said Watson. “For a global operation in today’s environment, it’s not a matter of if it is needed, but how fast can you get there. It may also be necessary to partner with companies that can quickly link and give you any data, normalize it, and send it to you in a standard format.” For many companies trying to do this internally, Watson encourages them to look at partnering with somebody for this function.