Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has become a standard process to improve business performance, collaboration, and predictability.
In fact, it’s become internalized to a degree that companies often have several (competing) S&OP processes in different geographies & business units.
Why is it that despite its popularity, only 42% of companies rate their S&OP process as effective?
Common causes for this include poor change and process management, misalignment in terms of business strategy, mismatched metrics across the business, dysfunctional technology and lack of expertise to operate and implement the technology.
Moreover, without powerful analytics that provide exciting insights – the S&OP process can be too tactical, too data input hungry and a lowlight on stakeholders’ monthly calendars.
We recently offered a workshop at LogiChem, a chemical industry conference. Our workshop simulated a Capacity Review session.
During the workshop, we learned that virtually all attendees had a pain point in common: they always had to go back to their desk to test different scenarios after an S&OP meeting.
None was able to perform scenario comparisons in real-time to discuss insights with stakeholders during the meeting. Some also lacked advanced analytics and optimization capabilities.
We asked – What if instead of having to go back to your desk to test different scenarios, you could do it during the Capacity Review session? What if you could get an overview of all your low and high margin products and find opportunities for improvement on the fly?
Suddenly, S&OP meetings would not be as tedious. Their flow wouldn’t be interrupted. You could make collaborative forecasts and run scenarios to quickly reach consensus.
That was a big eye-opener for us. Bearing this in mind, we put together some criteria for supply chain teams that are in the process of selecting new software.
Your S&OP solution should:
As a rule of thumb, we recommend that you look for technology solutions with the following:
AIMMS S&OP Navigator is a Sales & Operations Planning Application that is quick to configure and intuitive to use. We developed AIMMS S&OP Navigator to address the market need for a user-friendly and affordable solution that can deal with complex business logic and put the power of advanced analytics in the hands of business users.
Download the Buyer’s Guide for S&OP Software for more evaluation criteria and a handy checklist that guides you through the software selection process.