The growing complexity of organizations – SKU proliferation, new product launches, shortened lead times, and pressure for more data and better customer service levels is continuously challenging sales and operations planning processes.
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a strategic business process that companies use to synchronize the executive, sales, and financial operations to gain alignment on goals and achieve better business results. During the Sales and Operations Planning process, an execution plan is developed to align its strategic goals with the business plan. The Sales, Operations, and Finance teams work to align innovation, supply chain, marketing, and sales towards those goals by creating detailed forecasts for the predicted sales. It is a customer-driven business process with a mid to long-term horizon.
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is how departments collaborate to build detailed forecasts for the predicted sales. It creates transparency between departments and helps organizations to ensure proper alignment and achieve profitability. Organizations often plan in silos using offline plans and forecasts. Without this collaboration and transparency or an integrated strategy, companies can experience an inability to keep plans updated, inventory issues, inaccurate forecasting, and failure to respond rapidly.
All of this leads to higher operating costs and other inefficiencies throughout the supply chain.
Sales and Operations Planning involves a process by which tactical plans are created and linked together. The plans can be monthly, yearly, or more.
Goal: Balance demand & supply (mix, NPIs, promos, lifecycle, inventory).
Output: Aggregate plan meeting sales/profit/lead-times; sets rates that shape inventory/backlog/workforce; plans resources ahead.
Ownership: CEO-sponsored, cross-functional leaders with planning support.
Scope: Global vs. regional; ≤12 product families with similar drivers.
The S&OP team uses these inputs to manage supply and demand and considers product mix, new product introductions, sales and marketing promotions, product life cycles, and inventory management.
The S&OP plan sets the overall level of manufacturing output (production plan) and other activities. It seeks to satisfy the current planned sales levels based on inputs from the sales and marketing plan while meeting profitability, productivity, and customer lead times. It establishes production rates to affect inventory levels, customer backlog levels, and workforce stability. It looks far enough out to plan labor, equipment, facilities, materials, and finances. Below is a diagram that illustrates the continuous S&OP process.
The President or Chief Executive Officer should sponsor the S&OP Team. The team should include the functional heads of sales, marketing, manufacturing, product development, finance, supply chain, and systems and key individuals from master production scheduling, forecasting, production & inventory control, and procurement.
The team charter should define the scope. Determine whether it has Global S&OP vs. Regional S&OP responsibilities and define the product families.
Sales and Operations Planning Software unifies all relevant business unit plans into one connected platform. Different teams need access to the same data to view and model it in various ways to make decisions for their function. Having a single source of data ensures the alignment of the overall business objectives.
Sales and Operations Planning Software are either desktop or cloud-based solutions. The software integrates the plans and signals from sales, finance, production, marketing, and supply chain.
Most Sales and Operations Planning Software provides the following capabilities:
Cloud-based Sales and Operations Planning Software helps organizations integrate their plans from all business areas. It allows for the broad community of people, including sales, marketing, vendors, and suppliers, to work from the same, updated information, and refine it in real-time. The software gives an organization the ability to see its business’s current state at any given time.
Forecasters and Planners want to understand the risk and benefits of different plans and the effects those plans will have on the entire supply chain. S&OP Planning software facilitates this process by allowing you to run scenarios such as new products or suppliers, alternate routes, and see the effects on inventory, delivery times, and labor resources. The software gives you insight into the impact of decisions on every part of the business. It allows you to update and refine your forecasts with current information automatically. You can drill down to more detailed information at the product or location levels.
Most S&OP software solutions offer dashboards and reporting to give you end to end visibility of your supply chain performance. Dashboards and data for each major functional area are at your fingertips and can often be customized for the level of detail you need – from a planner to an executive. You have access to the integrated plan and can see any changes or refinements that have been made and what areas they affect. The information is designed to help leaders effectively manage their business functions with accurate and real-time data.
S&OP consultants design, implement, and sustain a planning process that fits your technology stack, governance, and cadence—turning strategy into a clear playbook of roles, rhythms, and metrics to lift forecast accuracy, service, and margins. Contact us to assess your current process and map a fast path to results.