What would a profit margin of 51% above the industry norm mean to your organization?
Those who expend a high degree of commitment and effort to arrive at a single, well-informed, unified IBP plan will find that they are rewarded handsomely. Now is the time to drive change and position yourself as an S&OP/IBP leader.
As market expectations continue to evolve—sometimes at a dizzying speed—customer-focused organizations increasingly rely on real-time supply chain planning to deliver a time-sensitive response. That means bringing together fragmented siloes of strategic, financial, and operational planning. And consistently, it demands something more: taking the next step and aligning daily operations with your strategic performance management plan within and across business units.
It is often correctly argued that the best way to achieve this goal is having a robust Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process in place, supported by technology, that delivers an effective outcome using correct and accurate data. For the record S&OP is a management decision-making process that aligns tactical (operating) plans across business functions with the strategic business plan.
It is important, in the current operating environment, that we differentiate some key principles, especially as it relates to planning within our SAP ERP system. Central to this is understanding the difference between S&OP and Integrated Business Plan (IBP) within the SAP world. S&OP within the SAP ECC world is the effective use of standard and or flexible planning functionality and tools available in SAP ECC to support the S&OP management and execution process.
