Sales & Operations Planning

Unlocking supply chain profitability for better business performance

The sales and operations planning (S&OP) process has always been a battlefield for synchronizing supply constraints with demand opportunities.

Traditionally, S&OP was viewed as a senior management decision-making process that ensured tactical plans in all business functions—sales, marketing, and demand and supply management—were aligned and somehow supported the overall business plan.

In the last couple of years it has evolved into a concept of integrated business planning, which is the process of continually realigning decisions within these business functions as well as synchronizing with the strategic financial plans to create a consensus operational plan for balancing supply and demand.

The measure of a successful S&OP process is its ability to create an actionable consensus plan that provides the operational blueprint for profitably matching supply to demand.

• Collect demand, supply, and financial insights from various functions and harmonize the data across levels of aggregations, units of measures, time horizons, and functional areas.
• Build unconstrained demand and contrast it against capacity constraints, customer requirements, and financial goals for maximum profitability.
• Build and maintain a consensus, best-option operational plan that matches supply-side with demand-side profitably.
• Operationalize the consensus plan into actionable plans and tactical recommendations in sales, marketing, supply, and demand.
• Measure progress against the consensus plan on an ongoing basis, escalating exceptions to appropriate stakeholders.

TXTPERFORM2008 provides a unique combination of functionality to ensure the optimal and most detailed following of the best practice within S&OP and the capabilities to ensure the demand and planning are done in complete coherence with the business objectives. As such the unique flexibility of the translation of demand and plans into a financial view or marketing brand profitability view or a sales account perspective. It provides a level of visibility and usability not available in any other tool. The KPI framework combined with all the other capabilities enables the plan to be kept live and therefore almost self correcting with a focus is on profitability and margins.