[Video] Roland DG: Transforming its sales and operations planning process

This blog is part of a video interview series. Check out the video below as well as links to other supply chain practitioner and Kinaxis executive interviews.

The long-term objective at Roland DG Corp. is to elevate its supply chain organization to the strategic decision-making level, says Zoltan Pekar, vice president of the company's global supply chain division. To achieve that, the manufacturer of wide-format printers, needs a truly collaborative environment and a consolidated sales and operations planning process. Roland is relying on RapidResponse from Kinaxis to help it realize that goal, Pekar says. With RapidResponse, the organization has connected the company data worldwide, and provided transparency and accurate reporting across the organization.

The company-wide transformation that Pekar speaks of required a change in mind-set. “That was critical in the process, and I’m very happy to say that now we have a full sales and operations process, we have people coming together to search for information, and it’s all based on RapidResponse. It’s been valuable, and we have lots of other plans to build on this data platform.” Pekar dismisses criticism of S&OP as a minor process. “The key factor for us was to bring the sales and operational sides together because we were a very fragmented organization with silos, and the RapidResponse tool has brought these sides of the business to the same table to make decisions.”

Roland DG deals with business-to-business transactions of industrial equipment. Its sales cycle is fairly long, but it provides a full solution of consumables and spare parts. Responsiveness to customer needs is very important. “Being able to see the entire process and the visibility of the data helps us tremendously to respond to all those needs,” says Pekar. “Being able to see the changes in demand and being able to respond to it on a single platform is extremely important.” Roland DG is building Internet of Things functionality into its equipment to enable it to do maintenance and repair in a proactive and predictive way. “The transparency that RapidResponse provides will optimize those efforts,” Pekar says.

Check out the other video interviews in this series:

[Video] Roland DG: Transforming its sales and operations planning process

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