S&OP Consulting: Aligning Sales and Operations

Our S&OP consulting helps a company put in place a sales and operations planning cycle that truly works: a regular meeting where demand, capacity and finance are weighed against each other, and where leadership decides. The goal is not to add one more meeting, but to replace decisions made under pressure with prepared decisions that hold.

The problem it solves

In many growing companies, there are sales forecasts in one place and operations plans in another, with no meeting point. The result is familiar: stockouts alongside unsold goods, last-minute decisions, recurring tension between sales and operations. The symptom is not a lack of data, but the absence of a process where that data becomes a shared decision.

The cost of this missing meeting point stays invisible for a long time, because it is spread out: a little overstock here, a lost order there, a night shift to keep a promise made too quickly. Taken one by one, none of it stands out; added together, it eats into margin. A working S&OP cycle makes these scattered costs visible and replaces constant firefighting with a calm, recurring decision rhythm.

Our approach to S&OP consulting

We apply the Two-Layer Model (leadership decides the plan; operations execute it). The decision layer (the plan validated by leadership) is kept clearly separate from the execution layer (day-to-day operations), so that the first drives the second. Concretely, we start from your real situation, size an S&OP cycle to your scale (neither an over-engineered process nor a meeting that never decides) and make it operational with your teams. To understand the framework, our article What is S&OP? explains its logic.

We keep it lean: a cycle your teams actually sustain is worth more than a sophisticated process abandoned after three months. So we start with the bare essentials (the right people around the table, a decision-oriented agenda, a sustainable rhythm), then add refinement only where it brings real value. At each step, the question is not "is the process complete?" but "does it lead to decisions that hold?". This discipline, more than any tool, is what separates a living S&OP process from one that sits in a binder.

The deliverables

• A fact-based assessment of your current planning and its pain points.
• An S&OP cycle sized for your company: steps, participants, rhythm, decision agenda.
• KPIs and meeting format that make the cycle measurable.
• Knowledge transfer, so your team runs the cycle without depending on us.

Who it is for

For companies whose growth has made coordination between sales and operations too complex to stay informal, and for leadership teams that want to decide based on a shared plan rather than react. You do not need to be a large company: all it takes is that sales and production decisions are made by different people. The signals that come up most often are concrete: a salesperson promising lead times that operations discover after the fact, stock growing without service improving, or the same crisis meeting, month after month.

The first step

A free 45-minute session is enough to gauge how mature your planning is and see whether an S&OP cycle would help you. No commitment. Bring your recent figures; we will tell you plainly whether a cycle is worth it now or whether other topics would have more impact first.