INSIGHT Integrated Enterprise Strategy (IES) 

For almost thirty years Insight, Inc. has supplied the industry reference standard strategic supply chain design tools to many of the world’s leading corporations. Time after time its flagship product SAILS (Strategic Analysis of Integrated Logistics Systems) has led the way with breakthroughs in analysis scope and features, optimization technology, user interfaces, and data preparation tools. SAILS has enabled companies to optimize supply chains large and small across the traditional silos of procurement, manufacturing, and distribution, examine world-wide strategic sourcing/outsourcing options by marrying supply chains with international finance, and provided the first and only industry capability to explicitly address supply chain vulnerability and hardening issues.

Insight has significantly raised the strategy bar once again.  In collaboration with Dybvig Consulting, Insight is pleased to announce Insight Integrated Enterprise Strategy (IES), the first and only strategic planning tool that explicitly incorporates both marketing and supply chain strategy and operations, thus enabling the firm to develop a corporate strategy focused on the premier goal of the senior executive suite: profit maximization. While incorporating all of the functionality of SAILS, IES drops the traditional assumption of fixed demand for a given scenario, replacing it with marketing campaigns, wherein both the cost and demand impact of proposed marketing strategies take their place alongside supply chain strategies and costs.  IES opportunistically assigns targeted marketing expenditures to those markets, channels, and products with the greatest margin, given available supply chain capacity, thereby increasing demand and maximizing profit.  Equally important, especially in times of business turbulence and contraction, it can    remove , subject to client limits, resources and demand from unprofitable markets, channels, customers, brands and products, once again increasing overall profit. In doing so, it avoids a common strategic planning mistake associated with silo management—the essentially independent preparation of marketing and supply chain strategies—and goes far beyond any sophisticated sales and operations planning (S&OP) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools available today. The key differentiator is the simultaneous optimization of the supply chain and marketing, taking into account all relevant costs, capacities and service requirements, under the assumption of changeable demand as a function of both marketing response and supply chain capability. 

Jeff Karrenbauer, President of Insight, notes that “IES directly addresses the principal issue confronting C-level executives today: how to simultaneously balance all corporate resources so as to maximize profitability and return on shareholder equity.” Adds Alan Dybvig, President of Dybvig Consulting, “IES extends the most recent thinking of how to link strategy with execution, as described in Kaplan and Norton’s recent The Execution Premium.  It does so by simultaneously and optimally solving the three separate steps in Chapter 7, Plan Operations, of sales forecasts, resource capacity and dynamic budgets.  IES is truly ‘next generation” forecasting, planning and budgeting.” 

Insight Integrated Enterprise Strategy (IES).  There’s never been anything like it, not by any other vendor, not on any other platform.