The formula for business success varies greatly from industry to industry. However, most business leaders believe that when you focus on the right areas and create a winning culture success will follow. Marcus Lemonis, a multi-billion dollar business owner and the host for The Profit, CNBC's small business TV program says the three keys to business success are people, process, and product. When it comes to Sales & Operations Planning success we can slightly modify Lemonis’s advice for the 3 Ps to people, process and platform (enabling technology).
While providing his expertise to struggling businesses, Marcus Lemonis stresses the importance of having the right people with the right skills in the right roles to be successful. Having people with not only analytical skills but also people, communication, and negotiation skills is critical for S&OP success. The person who owns the S&OP process must have organization influence, be a strong leader, be able to set an S&OP vision, and be able manage change to enable that vision. Key S&OP process participants also need to be very familiar with a company’s products, customers, and strategic objectives and goals to be success in their roles.
Canitz Says... |
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| A technology platform that provides a rich set of capabilities will enable the S&OP process participant to spend their time on value-added activities that lead to new opportunities and reduced risks. |
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Lemonis stresses that streamlined and documented processes are key to ensuring a business’s efficiency and success. Sales and Operations Planning spans business functions, pulls together data in different formats and units from different systems, and requires significant collaboration to produce a balanced and aligned plan. A repeatable, documented process with clear responsibilities, objectives and outputs is key to ensuring success.
Lemonis’ final ingredient for success is a company’s product. Here we take a bit of a departure when applying the 3 Ps to S&OP. Due to the data intensive nature of S&OP and the need to conduct rich and robust analysis the third critical P for S&OP is the platform used to enable the process. A technology platform that provides a rich set of capabilities will enable the S&OP process participant to spend their time on value-added activities that lead to new opportunities and reduced risks. Instead of spending the majority of their time pulling data together, scrubbing that data, and creating static pictures of past performance S&OP planners can manage by exception focusing on the most critical opportunities and developing feasible alternatives for evaluation in the executive S&OP meeting.
If your company seems stuck and can’t get to the level of maturity you would like in your S&OP process, follow Marcus Lemonis’s 3 Ps of Success modified for S&OP.
About the Author
Henry Canitz is The Product Marketing & Business Development Director at Logility. To read more of Henry’s insights visit www.logility.com/blog.
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