Supply Chain Planning
Why your S&OP meeting doesn't actually decide anything
A monthly meeting that ends with a list of actions and no decision in it is worse than having no process at all.
Most sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes fail without anyone noticing. The meeting is held every month and somebody builds the deck for it, but ask people on their way out what was decided and the honest answer is nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway. Every one of them still believes a decision was made.
Where the meeting's time goes
When sales, operations and finance each bring their own number and the meeting is spent reconciling the three, the problem sits in the S&OP process itself. Nobody gets as far as deciding anything with the numbers. The organisations whose S&OP works have forecasts no more accurate than anyone else's; their process reaches a decision whatever the forecast says.
What fixes it
A new planning tool rarely helps. Laid over a process that doesn't decide, it produces the same non-decisions faster. Demand and supply need reconciling before the meeting, so the people at the table work from one figure they all accept.
- Each decision goes into a log with an owner's name and a date against it. If something agreed in the room never reaches the log, treat it as undecided.
- Service and cash get decided together. Most teams accept a trade-off between them, and it usually comes from buffers held in the wrong place.
Dov Amar · Opyflow