5 Steps to Capture the Value of S&OP

The first thing you do is rally the troops and try to answer key questions:

• What could we have done differently?

• What could we have done better?

While you’re chewing on ideas and trying to learn from the experience to improve, you receive word that the next big product launch will occur in less than three years and that it will be a make-or-break endeavor for the company.

You and your team begin to reassess the company’s structure and processes. You realize that, over the years, the company has begun to operate in silos. Finance, marketing, operations and sales are all operating independently. While you have an annual budget, you lacked ongoing visibility into where you were performing well and which areas needed improvement in order to meet budget requirements. As you get farther into the year, operations are so far from that annual budget that it seems a bit silly.

After this assessment, you realize that there is no single source of truth. You and your team discover that if you ask the executives at headquarters the same questions, each of them would answer differently. The comfort level at the company is not very high as the realization dawns that, due to your product’s hot demand, organizational processes have not evolved. In many ways, your company is still operating as a start-up. The company wasn’t focused scaling operations to match growth; up until now it had no reason to.