to lead the company on its journey to optimized supply chain performance.

CLARIFIED ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Sony Electronics was well-suited to the initiative because it already had certain characteristics and capabilities in place. For one thing, SEL had a good working relationship with its retailers, built on years of doing business together. For another, the division had established electronic data interchange (EDI) relationships with many of its retail partners and was even receiving store-level point-of-sale (POS) information from several of them. But SEL also had some problems to solve. For example, the division was not taking advantage of all of the data it was collecting. It seemed that no one had the time to sift through the massive

Sony was founded in 1946 by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita. In 1950s post-war Japan, Ibuka and Morita created Sony’s first hardware device, the “G-Type” tape player/recorder, which relied on paper tape with hand-applied magnetic material. After Morita’s first visit to the United States, he suggested to Ibuka that the company name be changed from Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo to one that was easier to pronounce and more recognizable. The new name, “Sony,” was inspired by two words: sonus—the Latin root of words like “sound” and “sonic,” and sonny, a word that had been adopted from English into Japanese in the 1950s to refer to sharp and energetic young men.

Throughout its history, Sony has demonstrated an ability to capture the imagination and enhance people’s lives through technologically innovative products, including the transistor radio in 1955; the world’s first color video-cas-sette recorder in 1971; the Walkman personal stereo in 1979; the first 8mm camcorder in 1985; and the first commercially available, organic light-emitting diode (LED) television in 2007. Today, Sony remains a global consumer entertainment company built around a vision of combining hardware, software, content, and services to provide the best customer experience in the new broadband network era.

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files to identify useful information, let alone pass it on to people who might be able to act on that intelligence. Moreover, the supply chain planning and forecasting process, while thorough, tended to be tactical and reactive.

At the time, Sony Electronics was already engaged in CPFR with its major retail customers, but there were significant variations in how different groups executed the CPFR processes. For instance, the headquarters channel management team, a key voice in decisions about allocation of product and quantities for each retailer, did not consistently participate in the CPFR conference calls. Plus, there were no clearly defined rules for what data would be prepared and discussed during the calls. Without a preset agenda, participants might spend more time discussing the previous week’s results than looking forward to the next quarter’s forecast. Complicating matters was the fact that a large amount of manual work was required for Sony to consolidate the demand signal across all accounts in time to provide an accurate forecast to overseas suppliers. As a result, suppliers were working from a monthly plan instead of adjusting to week-by-week changes, a situation that sometimes created disconnects between supply and demand.

In order to bring consistency to these critical processes, Yuka Yu, vice president of supply chain operations at Sony Electronics, created a dedicated team to look at how to improve planning and forecasting. This cross-functional team included representatives from Sony’s sales, business planning, channel management, and supply chain groups. Working together, the team redefined the existing CPFR review as a tightly managed weekly call with standardized metrics, such as weeks of inventory supply by channel and “order-to-commitment” achievement. (The latter compares the quantity Sony commits against customers’ demand forecasts to those customers’ actual orders.)

Additionally, the team clearly defined and assigned roles and responsibilities for the call, including designating some roles as “speaking” and some as “ nonspeaking.” This distinction kept the calls on track: The speaking roles were designated for those closest to the data (account sales team, demand planners, and channel managers), while the distraction of well-meaning requests for explanation or investigation from less informed listeners was eliminated. (Their questions could be answered outside the meeting as needed.)