I attended the APICS expo in Las Vegas last week. What a show!!
This was very well attended with over 2000 professionals from across the world. The committee mentioned that this was one of the largest turnouts.
I particularly enjoyed the general session keynotes by the General and by our own Bert Jacob of Life is Good from New England! Bert was talking about the optimism and positivity surrounding us and to see the values in simple things in life! His company grew from less than $55k revenues in 96 to almost $500MM in 2010.
The break-out sessions on S&OP were all packed – Bob Stahl talked about myths and misunderstandings in S&OP implementations. JE Boyer gave a folksy presentation on S&OP to a packed audience – although he had a much short-term horizon on S&OP than most others including mine. My philosophy on the S&OP horizon is somewhat in the middle between JE and Bob – S&OP needs to discuss three months to 24 months and an annual look at the strategic five year plan. Bob talks about looking five years ahead JE talks about one year.
There was a presentation by Peter Murray and Greg Schlegel on Demand forecasting and S&OP in the 21st century – kind of a prediction on where we are headed. They drew a lot from AMR research and other predictors of the future including some fancy stuff like dynamic inventory planning.
There was an excellent presentation by Jeff slater of Sunoco on supply chain optimization including some neat discussion on metrics. This was a practical presentation that would excite a lot of practitioners.
And finally a presentation by Daniel Castle of TATA communications on Lessons from India was the lasting impression for years to come. Very insightful and humorous capture of experiences in India including Indian STretched Time and the Yes sir phenomenon.
I will post additional links in my future update of this entry. Of course, Las Vegas is always fun and fantasy!
