Sales & Operations Planning

The Challenge

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) can be described as an integrated business process that has as its main objective the balance of supply and demand, the synchronization of financial and operational planning decisions and the linkage of short term decisions to longer term strategies.

These issues are not new.  Corporations have been wrestling with the challenge of matching financial and operational plans and supply/demand for decades.  However,  with the globalization of the economy, the proliferation of product lines and the ever increasing expectations of ‘Mr. Customer’,  the lack of a fully integrated and synchronized S&OP process will undermine profitability and impact customer service.

For the S&OP concept to work, it needs the appropriate process in place and the tools necessary to support it. The process has to reflect the idiosyncrasies of the industry and the organization.  The automated planning tools must be designed to match the process, operational and business rules, or this process will not work.

The Technologix team has participated in numerous S&OP projects, helping client organizations define and implement new S&OP processes and then developing advanced planning tools to support them.

The Solution: The S&OP Version of Opti-Net™

The S&OP version of Opti-Net™  offers its users much more than the balancing of demand and supply and related management reporting capabilities. We leverage the customized nature of Opti-Net™   implementations to deliver planning tools with two features very few S&OP solutions can offer you:  Our solutions recommend very detailed supply/distribution plans that are both optimal and realistic.

The S&OP version of Opti-Net™  generates short term plans that satisfy capacity, demand and other business restrictions and that are linked to the longer term strategies of the operation.   A very comprehensive set of reports and queries allows users to evaluate the suggested plan and also compare plans to actuals.

These tactical planning applications are extremely data intensive.  As part of the project scope we adapt the data import module of Opti-Net™ to the specific needs of the solution and the corporate data environment.  This allows us to interface with any ERP platform and, where necessary, also also import data from other sources such as Excel spreadsheets, flat text files or delimited files.  We have completed numerous projects in SAP ERP environments.