There’s a new article at Supply Chain Digest here talking technologies to support the S&OP process. The article goes through the traditional mix of demand management, supply management and inventory management applications.

A couple of observations. One of the challenges I think organizations face in today’s rapidly changing marketplace is tied to the legacy and heritage of the traditional planning solutions. Traditional demand planning and supply planning solutions are very siloed in nature – focusing on the user communities, information and decisions that need to be made in that particular problem domain. While they may foster collaboration, it is only within the user communities in that domain (for example, collaboration in creating the forecast), and not across demand, supply and product simultaneously. There are multiple problems with this very sequential, siloed approach in today’s climate.

S&OP today requires rapid scenario analysis and cross functional collaboration. There are so many changes going on in demand, supply and product, that failure to integrate these into a holistic process and decisions that weigh all of the issues simultaneously leaves a lot to chance. And, because of the pace of change, there’s an increasing need to move from a purely planning centric view of S&OP to a process that is more operationally aligned – shortening the window to ensure that the pace of change is being factored into the decision making processes.

As market leaders push to become more demand-driven, one of the first challenges they have to deal with is the reality that you can’t plan your customer. The S&OP and all processes need to be oriented around this reality to ensure that the company is positioned to lead in a demand-driven market.

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Tags: Sales & operations planning (S&OP)
Posted in Demand management, Response Management, Sales & operations planning (S&OP), Supply chain collaboration
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