Sales and Operations Planning should be the single most powerful process in any manufacturing organisation. It aligns demand and supply, balances capacity and inventory, and provides a clear roadmap for the next 12-18 months. Yet in our experience working with over 60 manufacturing facilities across India, the majority are running broken S&OP processes that create more problems than they solve.

Sign one: the monthly S&OP meeting is dominated by firefighting. Instead of looking forward, the team spends 80% of the time discussing why last month's numbers were wrong. Sign two: the demand plan and the production plan are fundamentally different documents that no one reconciles. Sales builds their forecast in one spreadsheet, production builds their plan in another, and the gap is bridged by expedited shipments and emergency overtime. Sign three: inventory keeps rising even as customer service levels decline — a classic symptom of poor S&OP.

Sign four: there is no single version of the truth. Every department operates on its own data, its own assumptions, and its own metrics. When the CEO asks about next quarter's capacity, three different people give three different answers. Sign five: no one outside the supply chain team owns the S&OP process. It is treated as a scheduling exercise rather than a strategic business management process.

Fixing S&OP requires both process redesign and cultural change. The process must be structured with clear weekly and monthly cadences, defined inputs and outputs, and executive-level decision-making forums. The cultural change requires breaking down the silos between sales, production, finance, and supply chain. At GroEdge, we have helped dozens of firms transform their S&OP from a spreadsheet exercise into a genuine competitive advantage.