Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP)

With both demand-side and supply-side volatility, it becomes critical to balance supply availability with the consensus demand forecast to prioritize demand orders and appropriately set customer expectations. Historically, this supply/demand balancing process has been done reactively with sales, marketing, and operations team allocating constrained products to customer orders, expediting product shipments or reconfiguring products to create the required models.

Market leading companies have transformed this reactive, manual process in to a proactive sales and operations planning (S&OP) process.
The S&OP process guides internal and inter-company collaboration to balance committed supply with consensus demand forecasts. Through this process a Plan of Record is created to which all functional teams execute.

The Steelwedge Sales and Operations Planning solution provides the ability to configure and drive an S&OP process that allows corporate executives to agree on goals that are feasible and profitable, while improving communications, teamwork and accountability across the organization.

Capabilities:

• Comprehensive business model that reconciles and aligns the operations, sales, product management, supply and financial plans with the Annual Operating Plan to create the Enterprise Plan of Record
• Scenario planning for demand, supply, ASP, revenue, product mix and margin changes
• Configurable best practice templates, reports and workflow
• Definable business perspectives such as: product line, channel, region, sales, manufacturer and strategic business unit

Steelwedge’s customers have realized the following benefits from the Steelwedge Sales and Operations Planning solution :

• Improved plan accuracy
• Increased organization collaboration and flexibility
• Maximized product margins
• Optimized product mix decisions
• Increased customer satisfaction