Manufacturers across all industry segments are facing rising constraints, increased global competition, and the growing complexity of their businesses, many of which sell thousands of products to hundreds of customers. At the same time, pressure from stakeholders is mounting to increase overall Return on Assets (ROA).

Historically, when manufacturers have implemented tools for strategic planning and performance management at the front-line level to address these issues, they have not integrated them with the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process. In fact, the measure of success for these processes are completely different, one focusing on maximizing business profitability and operational efficiency, while the other's goal is to simply balance supply and demand.

What's more, initiatives to improve profitability aren't reaching their full potential because they are typically based on pricing and margin analysis alone, and don't take into account the rate of production. This means that the the products and customers that produce profit the fastest are often overlooked.

OutPerformance links strategic performance management and S&OP, giving managers visibility and control over business strategy and plans, while enabling sales and operations planners to make collaborative decisions based on strategic goals.

Using the powerful Profit Velocity™ metric, or how much profit is generated per minute by each unit of product sold, OutPerformance answers vital questions for complex manufacturers such as:

• What mix of orders should be pursued at what prices to maximize cash or profit before making sales commitments?
• Which customers truly make us more money and deserve more focus?
• How do we best allocate our production capacity to maximize profits?
• What is the best strategy to address underperforming or underutilized assets?

This strategic insight is driven down through our collaborative platform to align departmental objectives and shape the planning process, enabling the creation of a Sales and Operations plan with the most profitable mix of products, customers, assets, and shipping routes.

At any point during the execution of this plan, managers have visibility into whether sales and operations is on target and can drill down into the root causes of profit growth and loss, developing strategies for the continuous improvement and ensuring significant, sustainable profit growth.

Leveraged together, Maxager 7 and OutPerformance Optimizer have transformed traditional performance management for leading manufacturers to:

• Leverage the data in existing systems (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) to eliminate costly, time-consuming and error-prone duplication of data in spreadsheets
• Provide optimization to rapidly generate the best plan among a multitude of possibilities based on your own unique business conditions, and what-if planning capability to run realistic scenarios in planning sessions
• Analyze performance against plan and identify the root causes of profit growth and loss for continuous improvement and generation of best practices
• Deliver an average of 3-5% profit gains of revenue, reinforcing increased profitability as the primary goal of the S&OP process and not settling for “balancing supply and demand.”

Take a tour of our industry leading solution, request a live demonstration, or contact us for more information.