Doing Sales and Operations Planning Right

Sales and operations planning was the highest-prioritized application area in the IDC vertical markets IT survey in 2014 and was a strong topic of discussion among IDC Manufacturing Insights clients in 2015.

We continue to see robust interest in the marketplace as businesses wrestle with both structural changes and the proliferation of mobile, social, and advanced analytics tools and capabilities, but manufacturers are also wrestling with the question of implementing an S&OP point solution versus a broader, more integrated business planning (IBP) approach.

In other words, many companies struggle to understand the difference between S&OP and IBP.