If you are anything like the typical manufacturing company, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a recurring battle. The sales team and the production planning team just don't have the same objectives, nor understand the constraints the other team has to work with. Leading to long meetings, plan adjustments, intermediate resynchonizations between teams, and most of all frustration on all sides.

Get the bigger picture

Many software vendors claim they have S&OP solutions, but most just deal with the business process side of things. This does nothing to take away the misunderstanding of what the other team has to deal with, nor does it give immediate information when choices by one team violate constraints of the other. A real S&OP solution needs to combine full demand management with production planning and glue it all together with appropriate workflows (the business processes). Wahupa SCM is such a solution: all supply chain management aspects are combined in one product.

Immediate feedback of the impact

S&OP, if done well, removes the need of frequent meetings. The sales team gets immediate feedback from the system if a planned promotion violates supply chain constraints. The product also highlights where room does exist to increase demand. The combination of the system illustrating the snag, as well as having instant alternatives available, removes situations of people being blamed for things they have no control over. This works all the way to budgeting level; during the creation of the budget plan infeasibilities are highlighted, which in turn removes unattainable sales targets that are the drive for sales people to push production beyond its capabilities. For the production team all S&OP related problems simply evaporate; they do not get orders anymore that are impossible to fulfill.

We have not built all S&OP building blocks yet, but we are looking for customers. Learn about the pros and cons of becoming an early adopter.