A record number of delegates attended this year's Oliver Wight international conference on Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), held last week at RBS Williams F1 Conference Centre.

An invited audience of more than 100 senior managers and directors from 62 organisations (including Rolls Royce, Capital One, BAE, the RAF and Glaxo Smith Kline) heard from keynote speakers on how in recent years, S&OP has extended beyond 'operations' to encompass all key functions within the organisation - from new product development to finance and forecasting to strategic alignment. This model, which Oliver Wight call Integrated Business Management, is bringing dramatic benefits to major organisations around the world.

Liam Harrington, partner, Oliver Wight EAME: "Independent research shows that those companies which successfully implement Integrated Business Management, (regardless of size, or the industry they're in) will routinely outperform their competitors by a factor of 20 percent or more*."

Andrew Purton, president, Oliver Wight EAME: "Many companies have some form of S&OP but it varies greatly from one organisation to another. S&OP started back in the 1980s to provide aggregate control over the operational demand and supply planning process but not every organisation took on board its financial consequences or tied S&OP back to the business plan, as was the original intent. Oliver Wight were the originators of S&OP and we remain the thought leaders; these days we refer to it as Integrated Business Management to reflect its impact and influence throughout the organisation and on into the supply chain.

The conference's headline presentation was from Alan Ayres, European vice president of logistics, for ACCO Brands, the world's largest supplier of office products. Alan explained how the company, which owns such iconic brands as Rexel and Nobo, is using Oliver Wight's Integrated Business Management model to integrate its business processes across Europe, following ACCO's merger with General Binding Corporation (GBC) in 2005.

ACCO, which employs 8,000 people worldwide and has revenues of $1.9 billion, adopted Integrated Business Management as its global business process model in July this year and Alan says progress since then has been rapid: "We will have adapted the model to meet the specific needs of all our individual business units by the end of November. We expect to complete our first operational cycle for Europe, with full product, demand and supply, reconciliation and management business reviews, in January 2007 (just four months after the start of the programme) and to have reached 95% capability and attain the Oliver Wight Class A milestone by December next year." He is expecting the programme to deliver major efficiencies in the business through the delivery of one set of numbers and a rolling planning process with a 24 month horizon. "There's no doubt we're in the middle of an exciting cultural revolution - the executive team will be freed up to manage strategy, whilst middle management is empowered to work in process teams to deliver solutions which achieve business objectives; and we're learning that it's OK to have a problem - if there's a gap we first have to acknowledge it and then look at the options for closing it, with complete transparency of the risks and opportunities."

* Source: Aberdeen Group