Bachelor programs students of GSOM SPbU visited on the course "Digitalization of the supply chain" from the consulting company Advanced and got acquainted with the processes of integrated planning in business and learned how to build models in Anaplan, a leader in the field of integrated planning.

As part of the first part of the course, built on real business cases from the practice of consultants, students learned:

• what is integrated planning and S&OP cycle,
• how to measure the effectiveness of processes,
• when is consulting needed,
• how business processes are connected with technological solutions,
• what technologies are used in the world today,
• what skills are needed to optimize business processes and implementation projects,
• how to approach change management.

The practical part was devoted to modeling in the Anaplan cloud platform. Based on the results of the exam, students received the international Anaplan Level 1 Model Building certificate, which confirms the basic level of skills for building technical models in the system.

“Integrated planning involves almost all divisions of the company — finance, logistics, production, sales. Understanding the features of business and all processes, combined with knowledge of technological solutions, is a unique advantage that opens up prospects for GSOM SPbU alumni in the career of a business consultant, an expert in planning, supply chain management, machine learning and data science or a consultant architect Anaplan. And Anaplan’s Level 1 international certificate will open doors for young professionals to many companies that already use this solution.” 

Gleb Davydov, Head of the Customer Service Department at Advanced

“The course is very rich, with a lot of practice and assignments. Training can be done at your own pace; at the same time, there are enough lectures to ask all the questions, there is support and feedback from lecturers — for me this is the most convenient format for working with something new. And I also liked Anaplan: it is an unusual program for those who are used to Excel, so it was very interesting to restructure the thinking a bit, and if you delve into it, everything is very intuitive and conveniently arranged.”

Arina Time, a second-year Bachelor program student at GSOM SPbU

Following an 8-week cycle of lectures and practical exercises, the best students will be invited to an internship at Advanced, which is a leading provider of services and technological solutions for transforming planning processes.