S&OP

Alfen

Sector: High-tech manufacturing

Alfen's EV charging business unit experienced rapid growth between 2020 and 2023, driven by government incentive programs for electric vehicles across Europe. However, in 2023, that growth began to slow, raising questions about what the future would look like. It became clear that increased market volatility was on the horizon, and the need for an S&OP process emerged to enable smarter, more agile operational steering.

I established an S&OP team with the goal of facilitating structured, cross-functional decision-making and providing the necessary insights to support those decisions. Each month, my team aligned projected sales with expected inventory development and procurement costs. The real value, however, came from our in-depth contextual analysis of the sales outlook, which gave management a much stronger basis to weigh risks and opportunities and make informed trade-offs. Additionally, this proactive approach enabled the business to identify, reduce, or even eliminate risks before they could materialize, such as inventory risks around product phase outs.

Grandvision

Sector: Retail (optics)

GrandVision was in the process of centralizing its supply chain operations, with all supply-side activities coordinated from the head office, while demand planning remained the responsibility of individual country teams. This setup required a planning process that could facilitate collaboration and establish a shared language between both teams.

During the pilot, I represented the supply function at head office. I developed several S&OP formats that created visibility and transparency around the demand plan provided by the UK team. Key pillars included defining a common level of aggregation for decision-making, alignment of discussion topics per meeting, and standardizing the supporting formats.

The result was a recurring planning cycle that significantly improved the continuity and consistency of communication between the head office and the country team. This not only enhanced collaboration but also laid the foundation for future improvements in planning systems and tooling.

Inventory management

Alfen

Sector: High-tech manufacturing

After years of continuous growth and supply chain uncertainty, Alfen's inventory of EV charging components had reached unsustainable levels. In order to drive a structural inventory reduction, I started by classifying inventory risk based on its causes and risk level:

• Items linked to Bills of Material (BOM) for active products

• Customized components not included in BOMs but with recent consumption

• Items neither in BOMs nor showing recent usage

Based on this classification, I initiated targeted actions. For example: linking non-BOM stock to specific ongoing projects, sellout of dead components, re-introduction to engineering BOM's etc. The identification of drivers made it possible to define tailored strategies for each risk category. Also, the result creat transparency in reduction potential towards senior management.

PVH

Sector: Fashion Retail

Over the years, PVH had paid limited attention to inventory management, leading to excessive stock levels. These high inventories created agility issues and posed major financial risk, especially in a business where frequent store concept updates are essential to success.

A key issue was the lack of coordination in phasing products in and out.. Additionally, there was no demand plan in place against which inventory risk could be evaluated. I led a team to develop a planning methodology tailored to the project-driven nature of stock usage — not based on historical consumption, but on expected future concept implementations.

We also worked closely with the Visual Merchandising (VM) team to map out the product lifecycle statuses per product. With these two building blocks in place, we gained clear visibility into different inventory risk profiles.

This new transparency enabled several key shifts:

• A strategic move from mass production in China to made-to-order production in Europe

• A new way of working with the VM team to minimize leftover stock at the end of each product lifecycle

The result: a structural inventory reduction of more than 40%.

Interim management

Enza Zaden

Sector:

As manager of the planning team (7 FTE), I was responsible not only for daily operations, but also for guiding the team through a major change: the implementation of the O9 advanced planning system.

A key part of my role was to map the planning and production processes to ensure proper alignment with the new system's logic and capabilities. Simultaneously, I worked to strengthen process governance and enhance collaboration between the planning and production teams — two functions that operated in relative silos.

To prepare the team for the fundamental shift in ways of working, I introduced a structured continuous improvement methodology. This created a cultural shift: team members began focusing on root cause analysis before moving to solutions. As a result, several measurable improvement projects were successfully executed, and the team developed stronger ownership and clarity in their evolving roles.