LinkedIn·Wednesday, 5 August 2026·21d ago

Most IBP rollouts pick the easy site to go first. STADA picked one of their most complex sites. Their reasoning: if the design works on a…

Horizon Solutions

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Most IBP rollouts pick the easy site to go first. STADA picked one of their most complex sites. Their reasoning: if the design works on a highly complex site, one with more SKUs, more constraints, more contract manufacturers feeding into it, most of that design carries over everywhere else. Pick the easy site first, and you find out what you missed one rollout wave at a time. That's the approach Ali O., E2E supply chain strategy lead at STADA Group, walked us through on our Supply Chain Planning Podcast: standardising planning across 15 in-house sites and about 500 contract manufacturers, moving their planning system off SAP APO onto IBP. A few things stood out: - Org design came before the system - production planner, material planner, supply planner, CMO planner roles were standardised globally before the IBP rollout even started - The rollout ran in waves - pilot in October 2023, then two more waves through 2024, with the next expansion targeting sites that never ran on SAP at all - Their AI story wasn't a Copilot pitch - just an internal chatbot that's helped planners navigate documentation for two years, nothing more dramatic than that Ali's advice to his younger self: stop thinking in silos, and treat change management as the real job, not the system. Full conversation - https://lnkd.in/gArf4bm9 #supplychainplanning #sop #changemanagement Ben Wim