By the end of this year, Molex is projecting a 50% increase in the accuracy of our on-time deliveries. To realize such a bold increase required a significant change in how we aligned our demand, inventory and supply planning to the realities of our daily operations. To drive this goal, we started by developing and implementing an entirely new program for Molex Global Sales and Operations Planning and Execution (GSOP&E). 

We set out with program-wide goals set with improved customer and employee experience at their core, which will ultimately translate into additional service benefits for our customers. We wanted to facilitate more transparent decision making, and to support those decisions with the best tools to build more efficiency and reliability into our operations.

Our GSOP&E 2.0 program includes a cross-functional decision-making process that considers financial, operational and marketplace impacts. The cross-functional team comprises all stakeholders, including sales, product managers, supply chain, operations, logistics and finance. It is designed to address decisions across multiple timelines and horizons, including strategic, operational and tactical variables. It considers all sources of demand and supply and integrates key decision variables across the extended supply network. The goal is to make decisions that are in the best interest of the company as they relate to supporting our customers. To be clear, these decisions may not necessarily coincide with the best interests of an individual person or department, but they will ensure continuous alignment of Molex business objectives and plans to meet customer demand.

The GSOP&E model includes processes and tools to drive an information flow that enables forward-looking decisions based on a predictable set of data. The result is a business cadence around the timing of key decisions that enables everyone within the organization to execute based on real-time data without guesswork.

There are four essential elements of this process:

• Process Orchestration—Consistent processes and meeting cadences support efficient execution of the GSOP&E processes with defined roles, responsibilities and accountability. 
  
• Digital Enablement—Processes leveraging the robust supply chain modeling capabilities of the Kinaxis Tool Suite. Kinaxis delivers transparency for the entire planning organization to work from consistent, reliable data. 
  
• Data-Driven Decisions—The capabilities of the GSOP&E model create a forum for making timely data-driven decisions that put the overall network in an optimal position as the planning horizon moves from tactical to operational. This includes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will enable performance monitoring and help drive root cause analysis on variances from the plan. 
  
• One Cross-Functional Plan—One collaborative GSOP&E plan across commercial, finance, operations, and supply that focuses on the tactical horizon (2-24 months). 

These components and principles come together to drive in one direction across the enterprise—from part number to plant to the business unit and the division levels, with clear roles, responsibilities and decision points along the way. For the employee, the result is clear ownership of the decision-making process, improved cross-functional collaboration and increased operational predictability. For our customers, this value translates to increased supply availability, improved delivery performance and reliability, reduced order fulfillment lead times and elimination of line down costs.

We plan to implement the GSOP&E 2.0 process across all business units by the end of June 2023. We are supporting this effort through a company-wide digital backbone, known as the Kinaxis Tool Suite. This enables Molex to scale and align GSOP&E processes as objectives change, without sacrificing speed, efficiency or precision. Within the GSOP&E process, users combine rolling forecasts with constraint-based supply planning to ensure that our financial, strategic and supply chain goals align for the best business outcome.

The tool suite enables Molex to facilitate consensus planning and reduce surprises by gaining insight and vetting decisions through cross-functional stakeholders. Accuracy is improved while shortening the GSOP&E cycle with fast, collaborative plan development. Sustainable cost reduction and profitable growth is also achieved by bringing key financial data into supply chain planning to ensure full end-to-end alignment with financial goals.

All of these enhancements and improvements are part of driving the Molex strategic focus on building capabilities that increase reliability and transparency into our shipments. Our customers deserve the best experience we can provide, and GSOP&E 2.0 is a vital step to delivering on that commitment.