Changing market dynamics, shorter product lifecycles, end-item proliferation, shrinking profit margins and shorter customer order cycles are challenges that enterprises must learn to deal with agility. As these challenges increase manifold, they create opportunities for organizations to run leaner operations that align well with true market demand and improve performance. Organizations therefore need to achieve a fine balance between strategic and operational plans to generate optimal & profitable responses to these dynamic market conditions. In this context, we examine the crucial role that Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) plays in achieving Integrated Business Planning (IBP) through collaboration across both, the intra-organizational functions and global supply chain partners.

Aligning demand and supply profitably determines the competitive positioning of an enterprise in a challenging marketplace. In our consulting experience with organizations across the globe, we often hear comments like "we are never able to arrive at a consensus", "we never had a meeting with all the stakeholders", "our data is not current", "budgets are not fairly allocated", "the demand is unclear till the last minute", etc. We have noted that such breakdowns in communication & collaboration have often resulted in an unsuccessful S&OP process cycle. The situation gets further complicated owing to uncontrollable factors such as, volatile customer demand, proliferating SKUs, increasing new product introductions, global sourcing options and competition from several local players.

In this paper we discuss Wipro's perspective on the role of S&OP in enabling organizations to offer a profitable demand response.

S&OP as an organizational process has been around for more than 20 odd years and was intended to bring about better demand-supply synchronization in manufacturing industries. It has since evolved into a more mature process that focuses on profitability, customer centricity & business transformation. The fact however, is that most enterprises still struggle to get the basic demand-supply synchronization done. Challenges range from the lack of a mature process, missing executive management commitment and/or the absence of an enabling IT infrastructure.

These challenges drive organizations to constantly evaluate tradeoffs around "Efficiency - Responsiveness" to arrive at the most optimal way of satisfying customer demand. Organizations evaluate several levers like stock reduction, revenue expansion, cost efficiency or risk mitigation to address these challenges. However each of these levers, if exercised in isolation can lead to a one-dimensional optimization that will introduce challenges in other areas:

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