Sales and Operations Planning Won (One!)
What’s this short article about?
This short article refreshes what Sales and Operations (S&OP) planning is, the benefits to your organisation and where Kinaxis Planning One™ supply chain software can help your businesses to win.
Remind me what S&OP is:
The term Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) can be defined as; ‘the process of constantly realigning decisions in sales, marketing, Demand and Supply planning areas with the aim to synchronise with the strategic financial plans’.
So, S&OP is a set of structured business meetings, with a scheduled cadence, and sub-processes that enable the company to respond effectively to demand and supply variability. The outcome of the S&OP process is a reconciled plan that maximises financial and strategic opportunities and overall business profitability. The process aims to take place in regular intervals, e.g. on a monthly basis, and typically looks at a mid- to long-term planning horizon of four weeks to two years on a rolling forward basis.
What are the benefits of S&OP again?
S&OP offers us the following benefits,
(adapted from ‘Guide to Supply Chain Management’ 2018, Springer publishing, author Colin Scott)
You can run S&OP with Excel or other systems as we wish, however for accuracy, speed and ease to use, implementing aa Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) solution such as Kinaxis Planning One™, a leading cloud-based software, is ideal for medium sized businesses. We can then see concurrent inventory, Demand forecasts and Supply lead times, so all in the meeting have the same accurate information. The system, in this case Planning One, is the glue that holds the S&OP process together.
How can Kinaxis Planning One™ supply chain software help our businesses win?
‘One set of numbers’
In many businesses, more than one plan exists. Marketing might have a top-down plan derived from the financial annual plan with expected uptake on new product innovations. Sales is likely to handle another set of numbers where promotional data and trade terms play a major role. And the Supply Chain planning team is most likely to work with a volume forecast based on historical data. The aim of an S&OP initiative is to align these different plans and to form one set of numbers. All parties will now understand the deviations and risks and can jointly and proactively manage the plan.
To learn more about how Planning One™ can glue our S&OP process together and help us win, contact P1 Consulting at:
info@p1consult.com
(Colin Scott is a founding member of P1 Consulting – this article is posted on his behalf)
