Sales & Operations Planning is a decision-making process. It builds consensus between the various members of the management committee and describes capacity levels to be implemented and respected to meet customer demand.
Context and issues
Companies need regular decision-making meetings to ensure coordination and consensus at the highest strategic level between sales, marketing, operations and finance departments.
S&OP facilitates decision-making and strategic trade-offs between satisfying customer demand, deploying industrial and logistics capacity, and financial results.
A collaborative, global approach ensures a shared vision of future risks and opportunities (product launches, shortages, production lead times, etc.).
Simple tools, adapted to S&OP, can be used to summarise and evaluate different scenarios to facilitate trade-offs.
The Axsant approach
Axsant’s support is characterised by :
- Progressive implementation of the process, cycle after cycle, starting with demand management and ending with financial integration.
- Coaching of the various stakeholders in the process, from senior management to operational staff.
- Formalising the governance of the process and its various constituent bodies, including milestones that are consistent with operational planning systems.
- Putting simple and appropriate tools in place, with indicators and dashboards.
- Transformation, if necessary, of the processes that contribute to the various phases of S&OP.
