Sales & Operations Planning - Sponsored Whitepaper

IN THE FAST LANE: Sales & Operations Planning

Sales and operations planning is essential for strategy execution, especially for organizations with large numbers of SKUs or unique items. Trends in the competitive landscape such as the rapid evolution of products, decreasing average product lifecycle times, product manufacturing agility, increasing lead-time for critical components, customer centric product specifications and increasing product configurations are forcing organizations to plan at the more detail level more frequently.

Many organizations with great strategies stumble when it comes time to execute on their strategies. The most common reason for this failure is the lack of a Dynamic Sales and Operations Plan (DSOP) that is consistent with their competitive strategy.

A dynamic sales and operations plan is a central repository of information that guides the day-to-day and short-term activities of the organization. It is dynamic because new information is incorporated into the plan on a frequent basis, usually daily, and allows the organization to fine tune its activities. It is competitive because it incorporates the information about competitors and their actions so that the plan can be adapted and proper actions can be taken for timely execution.

A DSOP manifests itself as a centralized data warehouse that brings together financial, sales, marketing, production and supporting enterprise information in order to create a plan of record. This plan can be used to deploy the organization's valuable scarce resources using a robust planning application that allows the various stakeholders to incorporate their information into the plan or record. Once the plan is frozen, analytical applications can be used to slice and dice the data and exception management systems can be used to monitor transactions and provide alerts to a feedback loop so that timely decisions and actions can be made. The DSOP brings these key elements together in an integrated fashion. The figure above depicts this.