Sales Operations Planning
For friends of the definitions say that Sales & Operations Planning is a process of decision-making to synchronize demand and supply, to make compatible the volume with the mixture of products and to integrate the financial plans with the company with regular bases operating. Given the above definition it is essential that the senior management of the company or business unit will accept ownership and responsibility for this process. It is your tool to manage the company and define strategic objectives and business plan. The goal is to make this process to add value to the business. S & OP is a process run monthly as well as accounting and of equal importance and that it is not possible to postpone.
It is create and maintain a balance across the business (read the company) not only in sales and operations, while the latter require daily care and a focus. At the end of each cycle management needs to review the balance between demand and supply, if there is no balance between these two, many situations not desirable occur; orders are not shipped on time nor complete, some suffer levels of inventories will be in excess and others will be with missing parts, delivery times grow and as a final result of all this profit margins fall. You have a successful process requires a commitment and involvement the managements. Finally S & OP is a cycle of medium-and long-term, to plan, do, check and act. Defining some objective numbers, agree with them at a high level and agree on actions to each who undertakes to meet to achieve the proposed numbers. These are in short sales and operations planning. Investigating different Spanish language sources dealing with this topic, I found an interesting article that develops in greater profundid the theme of the SOP (Sales and Operations Planning) which can be consulted here. An additional resource on the subject of SOP is the material of published by Dr. Mark a..