I’m Focused on Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP).
How Can E2open Help Me?
There are three ways E2open can improve the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of your sales and operations planning (S&OP) processes:
- Feeding the plan
- Implementing the plan
- Supplementing the plan – i.e., acting as “the plan between the plans”
Feed the plan with more timely, accurate data.
High quality information is essential to an effective S&OP process (otherwise it’s just garbage in, garbage out). E2open provides you with the timely, accurate information you need to make the most intelligent planning decisions possible—for all tiers of your extended supply chain.
E2open provides a platform for aggregating and summarizing demand information across a wide range of sources, including customer forecasts, sales force forecasts, and input from marketing. The platform can collate all of this information quickly and accurately, and present it to planners in a unified form. The bottom line: better information leads to better plans.
Implement the plan with smarter execution work flows and exception management.
Carefully designed execution work flows are a critical aspect of your planning processes, particularly when it comes to enforcing decisions made in S&OP plan commits. Unfortunately, many companies don’t have what it takes to implement these work flows: specifically, reliable access to detailed, accurate information plus the technology needed to communicate across the multiple tiers of a modern supply chain.
E2open’s cloud-based platform not only enables your company to communicate plans across multiple tiers of partners, it also allows participants to quickly respond to those plans with commit or exception information. Exceptions are then automatically “flagged” so that you are able to work proactively with trading partners to resolve them—before detrimental effects are felt downstream.
Supplement the plan with more agile, responsive technology solutions.
Resolving exceptions can be a multi-step process, with iterative proposals, requests, and reviews, before the final steps of commitment and enforcement. Each step in this process introduces opportunities for delay and error. Furthermore, the longer it takes to resolve problems, the farther reality drifts from the plan, and the harder it is to course-correct.
Re-planning is no substitute for dealing with problems inside the lead-time cycle. It is much more efficient to re-allocate in-flight assets as needed than it is to completely revise and implement a new plan—particularly when the new plan is likely to meet equally disruptive exceptions by the time it is actually up and running.
What does it take to effectively deal with disruptions from inside the planning cycle? Connectivity and visibility are good places to start. From an E2open perspective, that means a cloud-based solution that connects all supply chain participants across a shared platform, with a shared view of real-time demand and supply. E2open technology also gives you the channels and capabilities you need to collaboratively resolve exceptions—seamlessly, quickly, and more cost effectively.
Download these relevant S&OP resources today:
- E2open Product Brief: E2 Collaborative Demand Planning
- Download the white paper: Real-Time S&OP: Working to Make the Plan, Then Making the Plan Work
- Watch this short "Chalk Talk" video on E2openTV: S&OP 2.0: When planning isn't enough
- Read the latest E2open Blogs! on S&OP.
