Manufacturing

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Executive Review Blueprint

What if it were possible to tightly link sales, marketing, supply chain, manufacturing, and finance, so that executives could easily see the financial impact of plans, see variances between supply and demand plans, and align actual results with financial targets? Decision makers could continually fine tune plans backward and forward, to create the best plans - and substantially improve business agility and financial performance.

That's the purpose of sales and operations planning (S&OP) - to align demand, supply and finance plans. S&OP enables decision-makers to reach consensus on a single operating plan that drives increased market share and balances critical resources to reach performance goals.

The Need for Executive Review

In addition to the sales and operations planning (S&OP) that manufacturing companies undertake - typically an annual plan with rolling monthly or quarterly reviews - the most effective S&OP process involves periodic S&OP reviews by senior management. The purpose of the executive review is to evaluate performance against the existing plan, identify any business or market changes that might necessitate changes to the plan, and to make necessary adjustments.

The IBM Cognos S&OP Performance Blueprint facilitates the initial plan and any necessary monthly or quarterly adjustments. Complementing this Blueprint, the IBM Cognos S&OP Executive Review Performance Blueprint is an executive management tool designed to facilitate the periodic review. Typically production and sales demand is reviewed weekly, and a formal S&OP executive review is conducted monthly.

Key Capabilities

The IBM Cognos S&OP Executive Review Performance Blueprint is a performance management framework - including planning, metrics, and reporting. Key capabilities include:

A structured process for integrating and summarizing the detailed plan generated by the IBM Cognos S&OP Performance Blueprint
Summarization of calculated metrics, exception alerts, linkages to scorecards, and reports to measure financial and customer service performance (plan vs. actual)
What-if modeling - allows managers to perform multidimensional and multi-scenario analysis to test the impact of changes in demand, supply chain capabilities and constraints, and to see the associated financial impact of those changes - capturing assumptions as well as annotations
Strategic financial management - ensuring organizational objectives for sales, profitability, balance sheet, and cash flow are met
Integrated workflow to manage and consolidate plans
A visual scorecard to display the status of the planning process, so that appropriate actions can be taken to complete it
Alerts so that approved plans are communicated to stakeholders, ensuring they are aware of initiatives that will impact S&OP.

Learn more about the IBM Cognos S&OP Executive Review Performance Blueprint. Download the: