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Vol 31 - No 07 - November/December 2005 Branch news : London & Southern - 21st Century Sales and Operations Planning Thames Valley and Southern Branch co-hosted an evening on S&OP. The guest speaker was Joe Booth, who as always gave us an evening to remember. Joe’s talk was titled S&OP in the 21st Century and gave us plenty to digest and consider. Joe was, rightly, adamant that S&OP is an iterative, exception driven process. The traditional sign-off meeting must be a Senior Management task and should last a maximum of two hours. How many companies manage that, I wonder! Joe spoke about the traditional disconnects between the financials and the volumes and sold S&OP to us as means to reconnecting them. Get Finance on board and you have a truly powerful business process that is key to integrating all the other business processes. It is vital that S&OP is proactive and not reactive. It should force decisions as it tries to reconcile the gap between plans and reality. Joe gave us some clear guidelines, including the observation that roughly right is much better than precisely wrong! He stressed the importance of rules in the process; particularly, that it is not acceptable to change a number without changing the assumption that gave rise to the number in the first place! No more changing the numbers because you don’t like the look of them! The meeting was lively and entertaining and has resulted in the IOM forming an S&OP Special Interest Group (SIG). Watch this space for more news. Carol Thomas, MIOM Hughenden Ltd Related Topics:
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