The S&OP process nobody admits is broken (and how to fix it)
The monthly meeting everyone attends and nobody believes.
Ask most supply chain leaders whether their S&OP process works, and they’ll tell you it does. Ask the people who run the monthly meeting, and you’ll hear something different.
S&OP, Sales and Operations Planning for anyone who hasn’t sat through three hours of misaligned spreadsheets, is supposed to be the system that aligns demand, supply, and finance into a coherent plan. In theory, it’s the operating heartbeat of the business. In practice, it’s often a highly choreographed exercise in producing consensus documents that nobody believes.
What broken S&OP looks like.
The meeting happens. Numbers get presented. People nod. Then everyone goes back to their actual plan, the one they built in Excel or in their heads, and runs the business from that. The S&OP output gets filed somewhere. Nobody references it until the next month’s meeting, when someone has to explain why things didn’t go as planned.
This isn’t a people problem. It’s a design problem. Most S&OP processes were built for a different business environment, one with longer lead times, slower markets, and cleaner data. They weren’t designed for the volatility, compressed timelines, and multi-system complexity that most operations teams deal with today.
What works.
The S&OP processes that drive decisions have a few things in common.
First, the data is trusted. When participants don’t believe the numbers, the conversation collapses. You can’t fix S&OP without fixing the data feeds that supply it.
Second, the decisions are real. Every effective S&OP meeting ends with someone authorized to make a call making it. Not “we’ll follow up.” Not “let’s get more data.” A decision.
Third, the frequency matches the business. Monthly may be right for some operations. For others, especially those with short planning horizons, weekly is more useful. The cadence should serve the business, not the other way around.
Fourth, accountability is visible. When targets are set in the S&OP process, someone is responsible for hitting them, and that responsibility is tracked continuously, not just surfaced at the next month’s review.
The conversation worth having.
If your S&OP process feels like theater, the fix usually isn’t more slides or a better template. It’s a candid conversation about what decisions the process is supposed to produce, and whether the current design has any chance of producing them.
We’ve had that conversation a lot. It’s uncomfortable. It’s also the one that changes things.
Is your S&OP process working?
We’ve redesigned dozens of them. If yours has started to feel like a ritual rather than a tool, let’s talk.