S&OP

At Brookes, we recognise the point Gartner makes - “The No. 1 challenge among manufacturing companies is connecting sales and operations plan (S&OP) to operational plan/execution.” That’s why we have a specific solution.

Breaking down functional siloes

In monthly S&OP meetings, managers take strategic decisions such as increasing revenue or adding new products that don’t always translate into operational plans that can be practically executed. They plan with one model and execute with another, creating a critical gap that is difficult to bridge. It often relegates S&OP to being a passive planning exercise, rather than actively connecting to results.

We believe you need to be confident that “you get what you plan”. With SO99+ S&OP, that’s what happens. It employs the same data model for both tactical and operational planning, creating a single integrated data model with one version of the truth. It is coherent at every level, continuously synchronised through perfect mapping.

This single model solves another S&OP problem. Finance and management must work at a higher level of collaboration and aggregation to efficiently identify trade-offs. But operations must optimise with a detailed model that includes real-world constraints such as plant level production or distribution centre capacities. Our single model supports the S&OP process with best-in-class optimisation based on detailed constraints, while being synchronised to support collaboration and better decision-making.

In all, we support three levels of S&OP processes:

• Strategic - sometimes called Integrated Business Planning or IBP
• Tactical Sales and Operations Planning
• Operational / execution planning (Sales and Operations Execution or S&OE).