Traditionally, S&OP was seen as a supply chain-driven process and was often owned and led from the Supply Chain function. However, there is now frequent challenge to this assumption, so where should S&OP be owned?
Despite being widely applied since the mid-1980s, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) still presents deployment challenges for businesses. These challenges typically start with the need to build a compelling vision for how S&OP will drive business value and then progress to the development of sound processes, systems, tools and structures to enable a high-quality process.
Once these challenges are overcome, the question of ownership of the S&OP process often emerges. The requirement for leadership of a broad, cross-functional process is sometimes complicated by the supply chain heritage of S&OP and the lack of experience of driving S&OP in other functions. However, only 25-30% of S&OP deployments ever progress beyond basic maturity and therefore this overall leadership of S&OP is critical.
So, who then should own S&OP? In the following article I describe the considerations to be made in appointing an owner for S&OP and suggest some possible solutions: https://demand-planning.com/2019/06/05/supply-chain-should-not-own-sop-who-should/
We would like to thank Neil James for his valuable contribution to this article.
