Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)/Integrated Business Planning
A well-functioning S&OP process greatly enhances the ability of a business to manage the supply chain and balance the inherent trade-offs between service, cost, and capital employed. It allows businesses to take advantage of opportunities and mitigate risks and navigate toward strategic objectives.
Conditioning the supply chain network to maximise flow is the role of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP). Visibility across the network against flow-centric measures should guide a collaborative planning effort; this is a significant change of emphasis from many S&OP processes currently undertaken. It is no longer about chasing the false goal of forecasting accuracy and justifying variances to plan. The S&OP process should continuously gear execution in the open knowledge of variability and, critically, apply as simple an approach as possible to enhancing flow.
Talk to an expert supply chain consultant
What we do
We combine in-depth knowledge of designing and managing S&OP processes with a structured appraisal framework that assesses current ways of working, including:
The quantitative and qualitative inputs from demand, inventory, supply and capacity planning
The operation of S&OP policy and associated documentation
Roles and responsibilities including meeting organisation and decision-making accountabilities
Planning integration, planning horizons and scope
Performance measurements and the use of KPIs in the S&OP Process
Cross-functional KPIs and performance incentives and their impact on S&OP outputs
A Flow-First Transformation Programme can then be developed that reflects the business specific aspects around process, people, and systems required to achieve S&OP excellence.
The Result
As the key process that balances supply and demand, the benefits of S&OP excellence include:
Increased transparency, co-ordination, and collaboration across the business; invaluable in a volatile supply chain environment
Better decision-making using data-driven analytics and qualified market knowledge
Improved customer service and experience
Higher profitability and optimised working capital
"OP2MA played a crucial role in responding to the immediate challenges brought on by the Covid pandemic and the subsequent reshaping of our operations and depot network in order to deliver material cost savings for the long-term."
