Advanced Sales & Operations Planning Capabilities Checklist

Supply chain practitioners have used Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) to accelerate, direct and optimize business decisions for the better part of 30 years.

Advanced S&OP, also called Integrated Business Planning, goes a step further and unites volumetric and financial information into one flexible planning and decision support process for strategic and tactical planning horizons.

It combines data from sales, marketing, production, procurement, transportation and finance to create a powerful decision center for all stakeholders.

By removing organizational and technology barriers, and synchronizing plans, an S&OP platform ensures your business plans are rooted in feasible supply chain network capabilities, with resources and investments deployed where they are most effective in achieving business goals.

Because advanced S&OP involves multiple collaborative, cross-functional processes, it requires a technology solution specifically designed to accomplish these tasks within one holistic shared platform. This platform must provide collaborative workflow, configurable alerts, active messaging capabilities and powerful algorithms to streamline and facilitate plan development.

Also crucial is the flexibility to view data in varying time horizons from weekly to yearly, and from five years of history to ten years of projections. The ability to aggregate and disaggregate data allows users to analyze data and develop plans at the level appropriate to their positions, while staying synchronized with users planning at other levels of aggregation. Finally, an advanced S&OP solution must work in various volumetric measures and in multiple currencies.

This capabilities checklist covers some of the key features to look for in an advanced S&OP platform.