Perspectives on Sales & Operations Planning

Improving Business Performance with Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)

Effective Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) measurably improves margins. However, historically, S&OP relied on backward-facing shipment data, subjective opinion, and incomplete operational data.  It was overly complex, costly, time-consuming, unreliable and inaccurate.

Now, technology-enabled S&OP processes drive a practical S&OP process, systematically integrating people, processes and data, and restoring confidence in the forecasting and planning processes. Effective technology-enabled S&OP guides participants through a workflow-driven, collaborative process, resulting in a highly accurate aligned forecast and plan that all functions and trading partners can trust. With solutions such as Steelwedge Compass Express S&OP planners can quickly adapt resources to changing conditions, significantly increase margins and dramatically improve revenue predictability. The key is the adoption of a flexible, easy to use, collaborative, and comprehensive solution.

Improve Revenue Visibility

Two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies have no formal way of aligning supply and demand based on corporate-wide inputs. Unscientific approaches result in poor focus of organizational resources like capacity, manufacturing, staffing, sales efforts, finance and budgets. The overall Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process suffers in turn. Creating true revenue visibility not only requires strong analytic support, but also the automation of systematic and automated processes for soliciting feedback and creating agreement among multiple parties

Create a Profitable S&OP Plan

Steelwedge empowers executives to evaluate alternate pricing scenarios, product mixes, and configurations. Once the optimum margin forecast scenario has been identified, promotions, product packaging and configuration, and customer targeting decisions can be even further tuned to drive the most profitable demand plan possible. Through participative processes, sales, operations, marketing, and finance are able to work in unison toward a common goal of selling and delivering the most profitable mix of products. The result is enhanced corporate earnings and more efficient operations.

Increase Corporate Accountability

Most planners point solutions don’t allow you to identify, track and archive multiple plans of record, individual adjustments, detailed accountability statistics, and process measurements. For example, the sales staff is inevitably overshooting and undershooting their numbers. However, they typically do it consistently. What’s needed is a system for tracking those consistent fluctuations and archiving the information for analysis.

Support Emerging Manufacturing Initiatives

Steelwedge is the first S&OP solution that addresses vital emerging manufacturing initiatives, revenue visibility issues, and corporate accountability challenges faced by today’s corporations.

Outsourcing Managing outside suppliers or contractors requires a high degree of collaboration and communication, as well as negotiation skill when dealing with competitive bids for limited manufacturing capacity. Accurately understanding inventory liabilities, managing demand and coordinating forecasts is essential for effective outsourcing.

Postponement Planning In order to understand how many configured products will be sold and to “manage the mix,” manufacturing companies need to dynamically manage product attach rates and connect sales pipeline data to customer buying patterns that are based on historical estimates and analysis of item/component demand.

Lean Manufacturing There is a misconception that with just-in-time (JIT) inventory there is no inventory and hence no need for a forecast. In actuality, accurate forecasts are more important than ever. Suppliers need to know what orders to expect, and specialized components often have long lead times and are not always in inventory. Moreover, regardless of short-term operational requirements, product management, marketing and finance need to plan and invest based on a common set of future assumptions.

Mix Management In today’s volative environment, companies are struggling to understand and deliver the right mix of products, components, and packages.  Retailer’s are increasingly bundling products to reduce costs and increase margins while technology players are becoming highly focused on delivering the exact mix of components required by their clients.  In this envrionment, the need for an S&OP process that manages  product mix and assortment is crucial.

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