Ernst & Young LLP and Oliver Wight EAME LLP collaborate to address enterprises' planning challenges to deliver high performance

- Alliance focuses on addressing business planning challenges in the face of rising customer demands and evolving market landscape

- EY and Oliver Wight to co-innovate on next generation of Oliver Wight Integrated Business Planning model for clients

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Sep 20, 2018, 05:30 ET

LONDON, Sept. 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ernst & Young LLP (EY) today announces a strategic alliance with leading business transformation specialist Oliver Wight EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) to help organizations address their planning challenges.

Those planning challenges include leveraging new technologies that bring efficiencies while requiring increased collaboration, new behaviors and culture change to work with more transparent data across the entire company, combined with rising customer demands, an evolving market landscape and the pressure to improve profit margin.

The alliance will initially work with clients headquartered in the EAME (Europe, Africa and Middle East) region.

The alliance will leverage Oliver Wight's experience in its Sales and Operations Planning process and its Integrated Business Planning (IBP) model with the experience of EY in supply chain financial and commercial planning practices and digital capabilities. Together, EY and Oliver Wight will focus on helping management teams to use digital tools to assess their enterprise across the value chain, helping to improve their view of the supply chain and helping to enable them to develop plans that align markets, supply chain, operations and finance.

The organizations will work together to develop the next generation of IBP, which is the business planning model for aligning demand, supply and product portfolio plans, helping businesses to allocate critical resources to satisfy their customers in the most profitable way. EY and Oliver Wight will leverage collaboration and technology to deliver end-to-end transparency in profitable decision-making, linking strategy to execution across an organization.

Les Brookes, CEO, Oliver Wight and Alliance Leader, says:

"Both Oliver Wight EAME and EY have a long history in serving their clients well and doing so in a complementary way. Oliver Wight EAME has a strong capability in demonstrating to C-level executives the way in which integrated business planning can help provide transformational results and EY has the scale to accelerate implementations and therefore results. Oliver Wight and EY will collaborate to address the processes, operating models, organization, behaviors, culture and digital technologies companies need to compete."

EY and Oliver Wight EAME are already collaborating to help a number of clients. This includes helping the medical device industry address supply chain issues for improved customer delivery; working with the postal services industry to use data analytics to improve operations; and supporting office supplies organizations to transform their planning processes through using advanced data analytics.

Glenn Steinberg, EY Global and EY Americas Supply Chain Leader, Advisory, says:

"There is considerable disruption in the way enterprises work, plan, execute and make decisions in their businesses. For example, implementing new technologies – like blockchain, intelligent automation or artificial intelligence -- can provide efficiencies but typically require more collaboration, and adopting new behaviors and culture change. For enterprises to be competitive, it is essential for them to be able to break down silos and drive end-to-end transformation across their business, which is the focus of the EY alliance with Oliver Wight."

Tanguy Caillet, Global Supply Chain Planning Capability Leader at Ernst & Young LLP and Alliance Leader for the Oliver Wight EAME alliance, says:

"Through our alliance with Oliver Wight EAME, we will work together to help enterprises discover new ways to reach and serve their customers, engage with their employees, maximize their production and improve how they manage their finances across their organizations. We believe the strengths of EY in commercial, financial, supply chain and operations and advanced data analytics combined with Oliver Wight's experience in sales and integrated business planning will provide enterprises with the tools they need to transform themselves in a time of tremendous change and challenges."

For more information, visit www.ey.com/oliverwight.