Achieving the right balance between supply and demand is a cross-cutting challenge that requires both alignments at the highest level and rigorous process all the way across through the value chain.

• Shortage or excess of products to meet demand
• Supply Chain idleness across manufacturing plants, warehouses, and transports.
• Unforeseen sales behavior
• A mismatch between demand and operations, resulting in high inventory levels and poor service level
• Diminishing internal capability due to over-reliance on agencies or partners
• Costs related to lack of planning (extra-hours, operations disruptions, logistic cost increase)
• Inability to connect business strategy to execution

All of these costly problems are often symptoms of a broken sales and operations planning (S&OP) process.

Whilst it is impossible to predict the future, effective planning and supply chain management relies on multiple actors across areas working together in unison towards a shared north, through a clear and defined process that relies on reliable and precise information. This is the role of the S&OP process.

The outcome is the well-aligned deployment of companies’ priorities to their operations.

We help our clients deliver their priorities through the improved day to day operations. Our methodology delivers an end-to-end approach for planning, balancing process redesign, advanced analytics, and decision-making culture.

Integration helps companies to strengthen their Planning capabilities, creating a robust process all the way from Sales to Operations, aligning financial targets, and strategy with execution.

We aim to balance efficiency with accuracy, through establishing a set of planning environment that includes processes, responsibilities, management systems, leadership and conflict management skills

Our Planning Methodology is intentionally broad, encompassing all the necessary features required to give business leaders the right visibility to meet their business goals. It considers 7 essential aspects:

A successful S&OP process has the power to deliver a large part of the company’s P&L projection. It touches almost all features from top-line revenue to profit, through to efficiency in manufacturing, inventory on hand, and distribution cost. We see our projects delivering:

• Improved alignment and communication among areas and with leadership through a process that speaks the language of the company
• Sales Forecast Accuracy (SFA) improvement
• Improved agility and risk management due to increased visibility of bottlenecks and operations restrictions to fulfill the sales plan
• Optimization of raw material, work in process and final goods stock levels
• Increase in service level and reduction of stock-outs
• Greater visibility and improvements in the cash flow cycle
• Optimized utilization of resources across the value chain and reduce peaks and troughs
• Ability to conduct better modeling and forecasting

Working with multifunctional teams from your organization to make sure we capture every particularity; our unique approach is pragmatic in design and fast to implement/adjust creating a simple platform to start improving results and develop a planning culture.

We strongly believe in working together and combining your knowledge of your business with our outside experience, proven methodologies, and cross-industry benchmarks. From the beginning of the project, we aim to work with you to generate movement. Whilst there are often natural tensions across many areas involved in planning, our change management experience ensures alignment, consensus, and buy-in. This has proven to be the most successful way to implement a robust and sustainable process.

To strengthen your S&OP process, a project normally goes through 3 main phases:

1. Business understanding

Familiarization with your operations and identification of current issues. At this stage we focus on:

• Understand company´s decision processes
• Stakeholders mapping
• Strategic goals, Go-to-Market strategy, and portfolio priorities
• Planning performance KPIs evaluation
• Planning leadership team assessment
• Understanding operations complexities: plants, warehouses, suppliers

2. Planning design

To assure that the planning process generates the necessary value, we focus on 7 elements mentioned above. Furthermore, during this moment it is important to pay close attention to some crucial aspects:

• Leadership: It is vital for the new planning leader to join the project in order to understand and manage the company´s multifunctional needs and speak its different languages for the sake of planning alignment and integration.
• Balance of Planning x Reaction: It is impossible to predict the future exactly and so in addition to improving planning competences, the people, structures, and processes must also be set up to react with agility.
• Technology: To ensure a fast start we adapt ourselves and the design to the technology you have at your disposal; whilst simultaneously taking a look into what advancements or tools could unlock and improve planning potential, forecasting accuracy, and scenario analysis.

3. Joint implementation

We place a lot of importance on implementation. We believe that the perfect technical solution can’t survive a lack of integration among areas, so we start the implementation as early as possible to create the necessary planning environment (conflict management capabilities, roles, and responsibilities adjustments, areas integration, etc.).

This also allows us to adjust to any issues we see when applying the strategy to the day to day operations. The technical design work front in particular continues finetuning the tools, systems, KPIs, and processes throughout the implementation of exploring technologies and cross-industry benchmarks.

An in-depth handover completes the process, minimizing disruptions after project closure through training and stakeholder engagement.