10 Essential Steps for S&OP Success

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by Greg West, Farthing West Chief Brilliance Officer

The great rewards from S&OP / IBP come through collaborative processes and focused planning. Forging a company culture that is unified in purpose. A company culture moving forward positively to achieve a common strategic direction.

The following is a guide to developing and improving your S&OP process. I have broken it into 4 sections. The first three sections are about People, Process and Technology, while the fourth is the importance of being Future Oriented.

salesandoperations_diagram

The ten topics are:

  1. You have to ensure that the right people are in the room
  2. You have to provide strong leadership while promoting positive tension
  3. You need to work on the input to the process to achieve great outcomes
  4. It’s essential you design your system so that facts flow
  5. You have to measure the success of the process
  6. You have crunch big data, but present concise information.
  7. You need to focus on the exception
  8. You need to integrate the plan with real financial data
  9. You need to balance the long term strategic focus and short term objectives
  10. Don’t just develop scenarios, develop action plans

Over the next few blogs, I will elaborate each of these topics in detail. I hope you find it interesting and I look forward to your feedback.