Traditionally, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a process of matching a manufacturing organization’s supply with demand by having the sales department collaborate with operations department to deliver an actionable and executable production plan based on the agreed-upon consensus forecast. With Oracle Cloud Sales and Operations Planning, one can achieve the true potential of S&OP and overall business objectives of the organization.
S&OP is all about identifying performance gaps and closing those gaps, but only a handful of best-in-class companies have the ability to identify the gaps and perform a detailed root-cause analysis, making it impossible to effectively address those performance gaps. With Oracle S&OP Cloud, organizations not only balances their supply and demand but also monitor the health of product portfolio (pre-launch, post-launch and growth items), ensuring achieving revenue targets, generating a supply plan to profitably meet demand, and reconciling your operating plans with overall financial goals.
A much-needed collaboration
A timely and close collaboration between various stakeholders is imperative for the successfulness of any S&OP planning.
S&OP is supposed to be a collaborative process involving Marketing, Manufacturing, and Finance and in addition to Sales and Supply Chain, yet most of the companies don’t do so, leaving a big gap in the entire process. Oracle S&OP Cloud helps you collaborate and reach consensus among product management, marketing, sales, operations, and finance so that your entire organization is focused on common goals.
Many times, organizations have the process in place but they lack proper software/applications or they have proper applications but misses out on the best processes. Oracle S&OP bridges this gap by combining the best practices with the best in class application. Oracle S&OP Cloud is designed to help the companies to quickly adopt a sustainable, step-by-step, best-practices approach to S&OP. The solution comes with highly configurable process templates for each of the five stages of S&OP: Product, Demand, Supply, Financial, and Executive Reviews. Each process template includes a standard list of tasks and a place to track action items, decisions to be made, and notes. With these process templates, one can quickly adopt best practices in order to minimize time to benefit and maximize ROI.
Simulate your way out
With highly powerful, flexible and fast simulation capabilities, Oracle S&OP provides answers to real life what-if scenarios and drastically reduces the planning cycle timings while producing more accurate results. Organizations are leveraging by running what-if scenarios for resource overload, demand fluctuations and changes in supplier capacity and lead times.
With Oracle S&OP Cloud in-memory processing, one can quickly run simulations to accommodate the above changes and plan at an aggregate level and over strategic time frames. Thus, demand reconciliation, supply, and financial plans and determine the best course of action
Embedded Analytics and Integration with Tactical Planning
Like any other Oracle Cloud Applications, S&OP cloud is also rich on embedded analytics. With its multiple pre-configured dashboards, reports, info-tiles, graphs, and KPIs, you have all the right information at the right time in the right place to gain better insights. With comprehensive analytics, S&OP Cloud gives you the information you need to monitor performance, understand shortfalls, and analyze new plans.
Finally, once strategic S&OP decisions are made, one can execute these decisions because S&OP Cloud is integrated with Oracle SCM Cloud. One can bi-directionally exchange demand and supply plans with Planning Central, Demand Management or Supply Planning Clouds.
To Summarize: Oracle Cloud Sales and Operations planning is a best in class next generation application which helps in making better and informed decisions by aligning your business and thus achieving the business goals.
About the Author
Dushyant Jain specializes in Oracle Cloud applications and Oracle global value chain planning domain and has over 15 years of experience in the management, design, delivery, development, and implementation of Oracle applications.
An APICS-BSCM certified professional with an MBA in Finance & Marketing, Dushyant has worked with clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and the APAC region. He has worked in IT consulting firms as well as served as a member of the Internal IT department of various manufacturing organizations. Dushyant has successfully lead a team of Functional and Technical resources while working on co-development project with Oracle for Cloud Planning and Procurement applications.
Currently, he is working as Associate Director at Trinamix Inc. where he is responsible for Oracle Cloud Application practice.
