Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is widely considered a best practice management methodology for manufacturing, engineering and distribution organizations. The process strives to ensure that your supply and demand plans are balanced and synchronized, and that your inventory and financial goals are addressed. If done well, the process provides a formal method for senior management to respond to change, both positive and negative.
However, many companies struggle to implement a process that can effectively enable senior management to make tactical and strategic decisions. Typical deficiencies found in a company's process include:
- Labor constraints – the reporting process is too labor intensive to be practical
- There are no optimization capabilities available
- Sales planning is not integrated with the forecasting tool
- There is no modeling of current inventory positions
- There is no ability to track actual versus plan throughout the month
- The process is only updated monthly, not continuously updated throughout the month
The WAM solution for S&OP was developed to be the ideal supporting technology, allowing chemical manufacturers to overcome these deficiencies.
WAM’s Enterprise Planning platform allows you to create and manage a viable S&OP plan as you develop and support an integrated environment of collaboration, reporting, and analysis.
The Enterprise Planning platform provides a simulation and optimization environment to create a balanced S&OP plan, taking into account product demand, inventory targets, manufacturing capacities, and supply chain constraints. Our solution fully supports each of the nine steps of best practices S&OP planning (shown at right).
Optimization comes in the form of an optimization engine used for developing production plans that helps minimize costs and maximize profitability. The optimization engine provides a means of rapidly determining not only what portion of a forecast is feasible to produce, but what product mix is most profitable to produce.
The WAM Solution easily handles complex, multi-site supply chain problems with minimal configuration. When unique problems arise, it uses our powerful model formulation language combined with the optimization engine to quickly generate solutions.
- Simultaneous planning of demand, production and inventory
- Optimization creates the most profitable combined plan
- Plan can be monitored at any time to display actuals deviating from plan
- Automated interfaces with your ERP allows plan and/or ERP to be updated at any time
- Integration with tactical planning (scheduling, order taking, MRP, …)
- Supports continuous updating of plans, while maintaining the original S&OP copy
- Includes extensive what-if and plan comparison features
As a supply chain professional, you must focus your energies on achieving best-practice goals. How do you initiate an enterprise-wide effort to improve customer service, inventory, scheduling? By proactively engaging in successful strategic and tactical planning. The WAM Supply Chain Solution helps you make smarter decisions based on profitability, attain global supply chain visibility, support for collaboration and assists in determining the right safety stocks to meet customer service levels. To make the critical decisions that you must make on a daily basis, you must have accurate, timely data and planning technology that understands how your company operates. Let us show you how WAM's supply chain planning solution can provide you and your team with the right data and the right time and place.
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S&OP
