On September the 8th, EyeOn hosted the 4th Life Science network event at Croy Castle.
EyeOn | September 16, 2011 | Life Science |
The event mainly focused on the subject “Seamless product life cycles: from R&D to product introduction to maturity”, which resulted in dynamic discussions, open knowledge sharing and many learnings. The morning had 2 external contributions, from Jan-Remt Mellema and from Steven Rymen of Alcatel Lucent. In the afternoon, there were 2 in depth sessions on using point of sales (upstream) data for planning and approaches for aggregated forecasting.
The first contribution was from Jan-Remt Mellema. He is ex-franchise portfolio director Women’s Health at MSD Oss, and is now an independent professional at Revalisc. Jan-Remt showed how a structured decision tree and prioritization tool enable R&D organizations to clear much of the fuzziness in the R&D portfolio decision process. The takeaway is that Jan-Remt’s bang for buck approach will focus and improve R&D efforts in every stage.
Steven Rymen, of Alcatel-Lucent’s NPI Supply Chain organization, gave insight in how the handover from R&D to operations works in the high-paced communications industry. Alcatel-Lucent uses 6 structured and explicit decision reviews, from planning review, via quality / validation through ramp-up, to align supply chain and even Sales with development progress. Alcatel-Lucent successfully makes NPI visible and explicit in its planning processes.
The agenda of the afternoon focused on 2 more in depth sessions on demand planning and forecasting.
Joost Rongen and Emile van Geel shared benchmark results of how and why leading companies use Point of Sales (POS) data. In the next step the roadmap and decision process to review and employ POS was shared. The contribution ended with a mini-benchmark via an interactive voting session. Addressing many requests from members in past events, Bram Bongaerts shared approaches for sensible aggregated demand forecasting. The key to achieve the most efficient forecasting process is to focus on the decisions that need to be made, and not just trying to achieve the highest level of detail.
It was an interesting day full of network opportunities. We would like to thank all members for their input and we are looking forward to the Planning Innovation day on November 10th!
Do you want to know more about the Innovation day or the Round Table sessions, please contact Inge Lobbes.
