9 Steps to Achieving S&OP Nirvana

Redefining Supply Chain Strategies in a Challenging Marketplace: The Evolution of S&OP
Supply chains face an increasingly volatile and demanding marketplace. Incessant pressures, shrinking profits, security threats, rising demands, and distributed networks lead to stiff competition.

However, these disruptions also present opportunities for optimizing technologies and developing winning strategies for success.

Supply chains have catapulted Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) to being the single most important mechanism balancing operational commitments and functional constraints.

S&OP enables enterprises to respond effectively to demand and supply variability, and serves as a proven risk management approach.

• Enterprises report an effective S&OP practice
• Enterprises have met their corporate goals using S&OP
• Enterprises use S&OP technology
• Enterprises feel that S&OP is important to agility

Issues at Hand: Driving S&OP Transformation into High Gear
The dynamic marketplace has practically relegated traditional S&OP practices to history. In many cases, irreversible marketplace factors have impeded the effectiveness of S&OP.

• Enterprises lack skilled resources
• Enterprises lack understanding from the executive team
• Enterprises feel that their S&OP is off balance
• Enterprises are using S&OP technologies
• that are immature or maturing
• Enterprises have difficulty getting the right data at the right time

Signs that Indicate the Ineffectiveness of S&OP

• Lost sales opportunities and poor responsiveness
• Discrepancies in production and demand
• Poor inventory management and unforeseen price reduction
• Inflexibility to respond to market priorities
• Poor forecast accuracy and unreliable performance
• Lack of focus on key customers, products, locations, and suppliers

Enterprises experiencing these challenges need to consider improving existing S&OP practices.

Adopting industry best practices allow enterprises to enhance capabilities, adopt strategic approaches, deploy next-gen technologies, and have better control over S&OP processes.