June 5th, 2020.
Covid-19 crisis is forcing big change in operating model. With its network, Demand2Plan is always careful and available for supporting your innovative initiatives in demand-to-plan: matching Supply and Demand used to be, currently is and will still be in the future the key engine of the Economy and all human activities. And it's also our engine!
Matching Supply and Demand has always been and will certainly remain in the future the cornerstone of the Economic activities and more broadly the main driver for most human activities.
Demand2Plan brings together ideas, processes, technologies and people to improve demand management and planning performance of all organisations.
We use the tools and the body of knowledge of the Industrial Engineering and Management discipline.
We are pleased to celebrate this year a milestone in Demand2Plan's business: We have been up and running for 12 years and Gilles and Guy, associates and founders celebrate their 23th birthday of intensive work since. More, Xavier, Laurent, Alexandre, Philippe, Patricia, Saïd, Patrice, Armand... continue their active contributions. We have a lot to celebrate, even if we're just at the beginning of the adventure. But first, let's set the scene with some history.
Before going ahead, let's come back to our recent history. Gilles and Guy, the founders, met in Lycée Champollion in Grenoble in 1990 during their classe preparatoire. They joined both Grenoble Institute of Technology in Industrial Engineering and Management and Production Management and Automation. They joined I.T.M.I. (Industrie et Technologies de la Machine Intelligente), a start-up subsidiary of the Capgemini group focused on Artifical Intelligence and Supply Chain Tranformation in 1997, after industrial experiences as industrial engineers.
Since then they've focused their professional activities on developping our capabilities around Business Process Reegineering with a strong focus on the demand management and the planning. First they helped the ignition and development of the Integrated Supply Chain Management Center of Excellence of the Capgemini group, integrating and developing the deep experiences of this group and all its acquisitions, including Gemini Consulting (Mac group, United research, Gamma international...), Bossard Consultants, Ernst & Young... We represented it from 1998 to 2001 next to the Supply Chain Council (now part of APICS/ASCM - Association for Supply Chain Management), and managed the technical part of the group relationship with the key IT solutions providers including Numetrix, Cap Logistics, MIMI, Ortems, Synquest, Demantra, I2 Technologies, Manugistics, JDA, OM-Partners, Dynasys, SAP, Oracle... with a focus on the Advance Planning and Scheduling part of these solutions. They managed from 1999 to 2002 the World Wide network of demo centers, called Enterprise Performance Solution Center as project manager and steered applied research and development around Enterprise Performance, Integrated Supply Chain Management and Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems. Since 2005, they manage outside Capgemini the development of these Body of Knowledge, including the associated experts networks and all key activities related to a Center of Excellence.
They also created and disseminated in France lectures on Supply Chain Management, the SCOR Model (since 1999), Advanced Planning and Scheduling systems (since Mines de Paris 2002), Demand Management and Planning (since ENSGI 2005) and Management of Information System (since Jussieu La Sorbonne 2006). Since 2018, we help Conservatoire National des Arts et Métier (CNAM) in Lyon (France) to coordinate all lectures on Supply Chain Management and we teach Predicting, Forecasting, Planning and Scheduling.
Twenty-three years into it, we're proud of the work we've done and the business we've built. And business has never been better.
However, because we've released so many ideas, services and products over the years, we've become a bit scattered, a bit diluted. Nobody does their best work when they're spread too thin. We certainly don't. We do our best work when we're all focused on a few things. But the pace of concepts and technologies development (with the Social Mobility Analytics Cloud + Open Source Agile Lean Sustainable Network + Antifragility) invites us to be prudent and review . As Demand2Plan is currently a very small company (less than 11 employees), we will dedicate the next months to reinvent again ourselves and propose to all our stakeholders a new operating model. Thus Demand2Plan will continue to deliver its brand promise: the best practices around the Demand-To-Plan process.
We are reviewing and reinventing continuously our operating model. We explore, capture and develop up-to-date best practices and address companies and organizations that can change the world in a positive way. If you're not a Demand2Plan customer yet, call us and give us a try. We'd love to have you. If you already are, we thank you for your business. DON'T HESITATE TO INSIST: our engineers always are very busy and fully dedicated to our current customers base. But force the chance if you want to work with us!
Standing by to serve you for decades to come.
Thank you from all of us at Demand2Plan.
-Gilles Manon
Founder & President Demand2Plan
-Guy Ollagnon
Co-Founder & Vice-President Demand2Plan
In the short term, we reinforce our team by developping a highly competitive human resource model. Our goal is to develop a high performance team sharing values, methodologies and tools
In the long term, we will review and reengineer our operating model, our products/services portfolio and our partners network. We will simplify our offer, achieve key developments and projects and give a new breath to the company. This would be our ideal situation as it would ensure continuity and no major change for our stakeholders, but we'd have to streamline our existing products/services, complement our team with the right additional entrepreneur/team with the right experience and enough financing to make it work and check that the existing team is ready for a new business cycle with a new operating model.
If you're a company or team interested in discovering and maybe joining our business adventure, please get in touch.
These two products below to independent sisters companies which own them and will continue their maintenance and development. We hope to continue to be a key stakeholder in these companies and we believe in the transformation capabilities of their products.
This project was the demand2plan contribution to the structuring of the professional branch of unregulated consulting in France. Gilles was part of the management team since 2011 of the Chambre Professionnelle du Conseil de la région Centre, part of the Federation Nationale des Chambres Professionnelle du Conseil. Gilles joined on September 2014 the region Rhône-Alpes and is helping to set-up the Chambre Professionnelle du Conseil de la région Rhône-Alpes. On January 2015, he became the president of this regional chapter. The goal is to bring transformation for SOHO and SME Consulting Industry in France and contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of French companies thanks to a more intensive use to multi-services and innovative consulting. We bring to our profession the principles of demand2plan associated with its positives feedback, working both on the supply (e.g. professionalisation), the demand (e.g. demonstrating the value added of consulting and its ROI) and the matching of supply and demand (e.g. with innovative sourcing process and a new marketplace). We reinforced the organization through a Continuous Improvement Process that we designed, led and manage till 2016 at the national level. Now, the team focus on the development of Demand2Plan innovative operating model...
We are currently closing and stabilizing these projects in order to share their results as we always have. We will continue these projects after a evaluation phase. This will be done in the new services/products projects portfolio of demand2plan. More details on this later.
Definitely YES — our entire team stays intact even if we cut costs and wages to the vital minimum in order to keep the ability to be sustainable even if we focus more on future revenue than present revenue on the short term. Our current operating model allows our finance to be a non-blocking point of our future strategy. There's a lot of really interesting work ahead for us. We're open to all your proposal and we'll be posting a few open positions in the coming months.
From the very beginning we've done things differently. From switching from being a traditional services company to a S.N.L. company, from being one of the early pioneers of the Software as a Service model with Xtradoc and Sharedoc, to open-sourcing with FrePPLe (the free Production Planning Librairy), to signing up about twenty customers without a single salesperson, to being bootstrapped and funded by customer revenues, to being based in Les Abrets instead of Paris, to having a remote workforce spread out across nearly 12 cities across France and the world, to use neither banking nor external investisser to finance our activity, to keeping our company as small as possible when "go big or go home" is all the rage, to share and develop our best practices with our collegues and coopetitors (CPC Rhône-Alpes and FNCPC), etc. We're used to these unusual moves.
If you're a journalist who's interested in a business story unlike any other, please get in touch with our president (Gilles Manon) at .