Sales & Operations Planning

S&OP – People, process but where is the technology?

Author:
Adam Peanna
SCM Applications
SAP Australia

Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has been getting plenty of headway in the supply chain space over the past couple of years and many organisations are seeing real benefits by having a structured S&OP process as part of an overall Integrated Business Planning (IBP) strategy.

Global markets with demanding consumers are evolving faster than ever before and the true value of S&OP is realised when businesses can model, accurately predict and deal with market changes in a collaborate environment while remaining agile and balancing the elements of supply, demand and financial wellbeing.  

Some organisations have struggled to move up the S&OP maturity curve even with considerable investment and well defined processes, but why? One factor which often contributes is the failure to recognise that S&OP evolves over time in a similar method as the business. This requires a flexible deployment methodology and unfortunately many businesses utilise rigid technology which provides a constrained view of reality, leads to limited process improvements and present roadblocks in curve advancement.

In the world of mobility most organisation heavily rely on spreadsheets to manage S&OP processes in scenarios where data is pulled rather than push and formulas and macros try to fit the business or bend the process to achieve basic results. As for the mobile aspect, few businesses automatically have the data at the figure tips of iPad user who wants to view exceptions, drill down and collaborate with business users within the one user interface.

In addition a few common process challenges which technology can attribute to include:

• staff are spend most of their time extracting and entering information and by the time the collection occurs the time to analysis and generate plans is absolutely minimum
• we have a team process but find ourselves still working in silos
• there is so much data in spreadsheets and scenario planning is a real challenge
• data is generally out of date at our executive presentations

To be able to benefit and evolve with S&OP a business needs to understand where they are on the maturity curve and where they plan to go over a time period. With this in mind technology need to be scoped to support these requirements whether they include social collaboration, business processes support with steps, tasks and timeframes as well as an intuitive analytic platform which supports the common user in retrieving and analysing data and being able to meet the needs of the executive team.

From the technology backend perspective it is also critical to consider who your stakeholders are (internal & external) and how you will communicate, systems to connect to and the ability to crunch big data fast.

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