My Leadership Portfolio - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages My Leadership Project involved my active participation in the redesign of Demand Planning Processes for Masterfoods, USA with a Terms of Reference document (see Appendix A). Previous to 2005, the DPP was highly focused on the details of item level issues, had an inflexible supply chain, a reactive work environment, a lack of long-term planning and innovation, increasing non-quality costs, and developing a culture of poor service provision. It was determined that the bottom-up approach to planning would be replaced by top-down brand target setting to achieve target growth outcomes. Also, it was identified that the supply chain must plan with more activities occurring further ahead to accommodate capacity constraints and to negate potential customers from changing their mind in the purchase of Masterfood products. Reorganization of the Sales and Operating Procedures from October 2004 to April 2005 introduced the role of the segment planning manager. The segment planning manager is responsible for the demand and operations planning of a set of brands and is reported to by pure demand and operational planners. As such, the segment planning manager has the focused duty of initiating continuous improvement opportunities of the S&OP. Step 2 of the reorganization was to “Create Demand Plan” (CDP), which was initiated in July 2005 by the Snack S&OP redesign team, as well as contributions from the Apollo Supply Chain Systems Manager. The objectives of the CDP proposal were to 1) Create a demand plan that is the single source of consistent information on current anticipated product demand & which feeds the supply plan; 2) Deriving through consensus a demand forecast based on objective, realistic, and visible assumptions which are available and open to challenge and then deriving a demand plan which reflects capacity or other constraint decisions; 3) The revision or demand plan allows the business the opportunity each period to understand the gaps (both positive and negative) to the financial operating plan or target for the Snack business; 4) Implement Manugistics as the underlying software for the forecasting process per the Apollo global template; and 5) Define or create the role for a sales planner to build more robust sales inputs as inputs to the “Create Demand Plan” process. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More