This interactive workshop will provide you with the practical tools and insight to improve the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process, drive S&OP integration and foster the collaboration between the S&OP team members and S&OP integration.

As a key business process to link the corporate strategic plan to daily operations plans and balance demand and supply, S&OP is (back) on the radar of many a company. While easy to understand, it can be very difficult to implement; very often, the approach is too technocratic. However, S&OP is a complex social system where human behavior is a central driver. Managers from different areas with very different incentives have to work towards a common goal and must be willing and able to break down longstanding functional silos. Furthermore, if anything, the subprime crisis has taught us that individuals and teams do not behave in a rational fashion but are subject to what is called bounded rationality. Numerous (subconscious) cognitive and motivational shortcomings make it difficult for individuals and teams to rationally and effectively process available information, learn, act and make decisions. Accordingly, the usefulness of S&OP tools, methods and frameworks that ignore the realities of human behavior is limited.

This workshop focuses on the leadership and behavioral aspects of the Sales & Operations Planning process to make it all happen. If you want to develop or improve your Sales and Operations Planning process and are looking for insights and tools to move forward, this workshop might just be what you need. .

Participants in this programme will learn to:

• Understand what hinders and what drives collaboration in the S&OP process
• Recognise the unconscious biases in supply chain decision making and harness themselves against them
• Align KPIs and incentives in the S&OP process to support the business strategy
• Devise an improvement plan for supply chain management team decision making
• Apply the latest insights from empirical research and real life examples.

The following topics will be addressed:

• The impact of S&OP on the bottom line
• Decision Making and Influencing in SC Management
• Behavioral factors that impact SC decision making
• Conscious and subconscious biases in supply chain (team) decision making
• Forecasting, inventory management, flexibility, ordering decisions
• Executing your S&OP Improvement plan

Objectives & Format
The programme is designed as an interactive workshop in which faculty will provide you with short lectures, case discussions and an experience based S&OP management simulation. This course will allow you to discover direct links between the material covered and your job which can be immediately applied in the workplace. We will also invite you to share your views and experiences with the group. The number of participants is kept to a minimum in order to create room to network, to share best practice examples and to receive feedback from faculty and other participants on your own S&OP challenges.