Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
You need to synchronize the physical and digital supply chain with corporate goals and objectives to:
- Improve profit margins
- Enhance business process alignment
- Boost your return on assets
- Reduce supply chain risk
Key Challenges
Insufficient forecast accuracy - Erratic customer behavior results in poor decisions without the synchronization of processes, systems and people
Seasonality and demand spikes - Overlooking seasonal inventory requirements or new trends results in stock outs and a fall off in sales, leading to poor customer service
Disparate information and objectives - Your supply chain and finance information resides in multiple transaction systems making it difficult to make the best decisions for your organization and align common business goals
Capabilities
- Decision support
- Process controls
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Scenario management
QAD helps companies adopt and use S&OP by facilitating better communication and planning across the company. Your S&OP approach is simplified by offering the following key capabilities:
Executive Decision Support
QAD DSCP provides management with optimal decision support for the entire supply chain. Scorecards and dashboards provide “at a glance” information about business performance across the enterprise.
The solution is engineered to support finance stakeholders which is evident by the support for:
Financial KPIs, such as ROCE, EBITDA and EPS
Planned income statement reports for trading expenses and revenue
Planned balance sheet “impact” including cash, payables and receivables
Capital planning and budgeting
Planning Process Control
Task management provides your organization the ability to generate a set of repeatable and auditable tasks for each S&OP planning cycle. This ensures the process gets executed exactly the same way every planning cycle irrespective of external events.
A common planning horizon that transcends fiscal years can be defined while still providing fiscal year based metrics, alerts and dashboards. A unique feature is the ability to plan over an extended planning horizon (usually 18 months) while also providing a fiscal year view to the finance stakeholders.
Cross-Functional Collaboration & Alignment
You can facilitate clear and formal collaboration and cross-functional communication across your business. The solution ensures a company-wide vision shared by all business stakeholders. Collaboration techniques provide a social capability to comment, and share details of the plans or raise risks, tasks, assumptions and issues for stakeholder follow-up.
Demand data is synchronized with demand planning and supply data including Production Planning, Distribution Planning and Procurement Planning solutions. All three solutions share a common data model which reduces the need for integration, double entry, or additional master data ownership, and ultimately reducing the cost of ownership.
The solution provides a “closed-loop” with operational plans. S&OP plans need to align in two directions; firstly with executive goals and secondly with operations to ensure the decisions of the S&OP are put into motion.
Due to the close synchronization between S&OP and QAD DSCP, the solution provides a unique capability to reconcile S&OP planning decisions with the operational demand and supply plans.
Scenario Management
Plan for the Risk. The best way to measure the impact of your risk is to model it. What if there is a cost increase from a trading country imposing trading tariffs? What if there is a short term supply constraint due to a natural disaster? QAD provides a comprehensive end-to-end scenario management process to model different scenarios, and uses balanced scorecards to identify that plan that best deals with a given situation.
Achieve the Desired Outcome. Not every intention turns out the way it was intended. Scenario management provides the ability to try alternate initiatives to re-align the plan with the corporate objectives. The impact of every plan change can be measured in terms of adherence to corporate objectives. The alternate what-if scenarios are crucial input into the pre-S&OP meeting for stakeholder consideration.
Future Proof Technology
Cloud deployment. QAD DSCP is available in the QAD Cloud or AWS public cloud. Both options provide a secure, reliable, and extensive cloud infrastructure.
Mobility. The user experience supports Web, mobile and touch screen user interfaces.
Analytics. As IoT and machine learning deliver a greater number of data points, supply chain solutions must have a best-in-class capability to translate data into trends and decision grade analytics. QAD DSCP seamlessly embeds capability from Qlik, a leading business analytics provider. This provides an intelligent and intuitive user experience supporting responsive and accurate decision making.
In-Memory. QAD DSCP uses a highly scalable, rapid in-memory data model enabling real time simulation planning and effective decision support.
ADM Improves Quality of Sales Forecasts
The specialist in animal nutrition boosts customer service levels and reduces inventory with improved sales forecast accuracy.
ARaymond Redefines Business Processes for Its Supply Chain
The leader in the automotive market achieved greater reliability in forecasts, cost savings and improved collaboration with QAD Demand Planning, Distribution Planning and Production Planning.
Mapa Spontex Improves Forecast Accuracy and Customer Service, Reduces Inventory Levels
The market leader for home care and hand protection products improves visibility and control of its global supply chain with QAD Demand Planning, Distribution Planning and Production Planning.
Further Information
Understanding Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)
Why is Sales and Operations Planning Important to the Digital Supply Chain?
The goal of a S&OP process is clearly to decide. We have our forecasts, we check our capacity, and we need to be all together, sales, finance, management, to decide.
Benoit Barre - Quick Connectors Network Coordinator, ARaymond
How Can We Help You?
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