This is the stage of the S&OP process that is most manual intensive and performed as part of the actual S&OP meetings. Companies are reporting that the biggest challenge that they have is to bring in data from disparate sources for the S&OP meetings and be able to perform the balancing in real-time based on volumes leave alone financial considerations. The next generation of technology in this area is going to be in the area of simulation – being able to adjust demand and supply parameters in addition to risk factors and be able to assess key metrics that are impacted by these parameters.

Performance Management (“What if” analysis & Plan Quality/Metrics)
Companies are reporting the following with respect to their ability to resolve demand shortages (in terms of volume or revenue) as part of their S&OP technology.

Table 7: Resolution Capabilities for Demand Shortage

Companies are reporting the following with respect to their ability to meet a supply shortage (part or capacity shortage) as part of their existing S&OP technology.

Table 8: Resolution Capabilities for Supply Shortage

The key takeaways from these findings are that 55% of companies lack demand side root cause analysis capabilities and 41% lack supply side root cause analysis capabilities. This is a critical area for companies and their technology vendors to address to achieve the profit-optimized promise of Integrated Business Planning.

Integrated Business Planning Workbench
Given the highly cross-functional nature of Integrated Business Planning processes, there is a need for an overall workbench that has the following technology enablers:
• Scenario Management – the ability to create, save and analyze different versions of the business plans at the different stages of the process.
• Master Data Management – to be able to create and manage data that may not be available within ERP or legacy systems but are critical to the Integrated Business Planning process

• Analytics – to be able to create reports on key areas of the Integrated Business Planning Process like financial performance, demand performance, supply performance, plan versus actuals, etc.
• Role based workflows – Integrated Business Planning Processes are unique to every industry and even every customer. There is a need for a workflow component in this workbench to configure the process for the company. This component also should provide the infrastructure for emails, alerts and exceptions to allow collaborative processes.

Companies should evaluate two categories of solutions for the IBP workbench:
• Business Intelligence vendors are providing horizontal S&OP application framework – including planning, metrics, and reporting -- across the enterprise. These applications provide workflow components that can be used to develop S&OP workbenches.
• Vendors are providing composite S&OP applications that span the individual modules that they have traditionally provided and provide additional best practices workflows with inputs from their key customers.