Paul Eckersley, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) expert, works for DynaSys as a Global Sales & Account Manager.
From Sales & Operations Planning to Integrated Business Planning
S&OP, at its essence, is a business management process that tries to align both functional and leadership teams principally across Sales and Operations.
Sales & Operations Planning will work with most companies, mainly those that produce goods or buying goods and then sell them on.
The more mature companies will certainly benefit from S&OP, but they often set the bar a little bit too low, their ambitions are too low, they continue to focus just on volumes and not on the integration of the financial part of things.
DynaSys is engaged with a number of companies that are taking this important financial integration right from day 1.
Integrate the financial part into S&OP leads to a new process called Integrated Business Planning (IBP). However, this terminology is not always used within the companies.
Maybe one day most people will start to regard IBP as the process, with S&OP at its core. So maybe most people will start to talk about IBP rather than S&OP. Integrated Business Planning and Sales & Operations Planning are very closely linked. It make a lot of sense for a lot of business now to integrate the financials into a S&OP process. Integrated Business Planning is the process of the future, but it will never truly replace Sales & Operations Planning.
