Sales and Operations Planning: it still works in the 21st Century

Sales and Operations Planning is a process to develop tactical plans that provide management the ability to strategically direct its businesses to achieve competitive advantage on a continuous basis by integrating customer-focused marketing plans for new and existing products and services with the management of the supply chain. The process brings together all the plans for the business (sales, marketing, development, manufacturing, operations, sourcing, and financial) into one integrated set of plans.

S&OP is a formal business process used by the organisation’s leadership team to connect corporate business planning with tactical planning, driving more detailed service operations plans.

S&OP provides managers with an opportunity to review and update the strategic business plan to meet organisational and marketplace changes as they occur through time.

S&OP ensures that the demand and supply plans are realistic, synchronized, and support the business plan.

S&OP provides sales and marketing with an opportunity to periodically review and revise demand plans so that they are closely synchronized with actual sales occurring in the marketplace.

S&OP enables managers to review and revise service operations plans that support the demand plan while optimizing productive and financial assets.

S&OP uses the aggregate data of sales, production, and inventory along with aggregate planning time buckets and product families to ensure greater planning accuracy.

S&OP provides the opportunity to translate the business plans, which are normally expressed in monetary units, into product family units of measure that production can understand and work with (units, hours, weight, lengths).

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