A case for continuous sales and operations planning
With an increasing emphasis on being demand-driven, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is gaining additional awareness in many companies. And, it is being elevated to a more strategic business process with increasing executive awareness.
The problem with classic S&OP lies in its lack of responsiveness to
everpresent changes. The lack of a single integrated S&OP modeling tool and the need to deal with myriad data sources make the process cumbersome, and its iterative nature (due to “what-if” questions) means that it often can take up to four weeks to complete. This makes the data stale, since significant events often occur during that time.
Yet with hundreds of products and feature combinations, current S&OP cannot simulate forecast ranges in an acceptable time frame. A new approach is clearly needed—one that lets companies augment their current S&OP process by modeling the impact of many forecast scenarios in real time while quickly and asily calculating the flexibility/cost tradeoff of forecast ranges.
Response Management complements S&OP perfectly by enabling businesses to:
> Dramatically reduce S&OP cycle time by improving business performance through continuous alignment of supply and demand
> Model an environment that includes all supply chain participants, including critical outsourcing partners
> Include all relevant variables of demand, supply, capacity, and product, including new product introduction
> Frequently and easily assess in real time the impact of proposed
changes in all areas
> Instantly model and score multiple “what-if
