View our most recent webcast featuring S&OP pioneer Dick Ling. Learn the key ingredients for S&OP success and how Demand Solutions can help you achieve your S&OP goals.
View Webcast
|
|
Transform production planning into integrated decision making
Since its inception in the 1980s, Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) has been a vital process for managing profitability and risk. Demand Solutions S&OP is a flexible, customizable system that takes the process from data collection to a dynamic plan that drives production and sales.
Everyone wants executive time—make sure you deliver value when you get it.
Tailor your software to your process - not the other way around
Too often planning tools follow strict methodologies that turn the process into an internal game of Twister. DS S&OP is flexible to adapt to your management preferences.
- The standard configuration comprises six sections providing executive-level information on Bookings, Sales, Production, Inventory, Shipments and Backlog. All sections are configurable to fit your particular business.
- Rows can be customized to meet your specific requirements. The standard configuration includes Sales, Production and Inventory comparisons with Last Year, Budget and Latest Estimate, so that gaps, deviations and trends can be readily identified.
- DS S&OP is configurable to provide executive information at whatever product-family or business levels of detail your management team wants.
Dynamic business planning
Most companies create an annual plan. Work stops. Plans are built and rarely revisited. DS S&OP can create annual fiscal business plans that are dynamic and easy to change mid course. It allows you to look at best and worst-case forecasts (or any level in between) to let you build strategies and contingencies that will allow you to change your behavior as hard sales numbers become available. You can run “what if” scenarios based on any assumptions you want. With DS S&OP you can:
- Establish volume balance by product families
- Tie volume to mix inside the planning parameter
- Integrate operational plans with financial plans
- Set appropriate policy and strategy
Drive your business. See your gaps.
- DS S&OP lets you see exceptions between your business plan and the plans dynamically generated in the planning tool. The exception alerts are color coded so you can easily spot problems.
- A search capability allows you to identify, by exception, the families or business units where user-defined levels of deviations are occurring.
- Work from a single set of numbers. No more dueling spreadsheets.
- A good S&OP process starts with a good demand plan.
DS S&OP establishes a common repository of the pertinent information necessary for the planning process: forecast, inventory, shipments and production back-log. The system allows you to combine data from sales, marketing, production, procurement, transportation and finance for a unified view.
Scenario planning
How much will it cost to have 100% service levels?
What is impact if we close or lose a plant?
What is the true impact of the promotional spend – did it help or hurt?
In DS S&OP you can make changes to your planning assumptions in the existing plan and save the changes as you conduct “what if” scenarios.
- DS S&OP is fully integrated with Demand Solutions Forecast Management and Demand Solutions Requirements Planning and imports data through the DS FM database. The user-defined Import/Export utility within Demand Solutions products makes it remarkably easy to interface directly with other business systems.
- DS S&OP data may be reviewed - and adjusted on the screen, or reviewed in graphical or printed formats. DS S&OP’s powerful “what if” capabilities allow management to simulate new business scenarios and to quantify their impact on production, inventory, backorders etc. Year-end projections are continuously updated to provide focus on fiscal year performance.
- Custom views can be saved and refreshed as new data is available and assumptions can be recorded and incorporated, within a notepad, for future reference.
