Tag Archives: Operations Strategy

S&OP is a business management process that involves sales forecast reports, planning for demand and supply, and other factors. The goal is to help companies get a better, more clear look at their operations and create better-informed strategy decisions, allowing them to deliver what clients need in the most profitable way.

It’s a useful process, but we’ve found a lot of our clients do not include inventory as a strategic tool in their S&OP process. Therefore, they leave the “I” out of SIOP.

“A key to SIOP is to emphasize inventory as a strategic tool to help offset variation in either demand or production issues,” explains David Shouldice, senior vice president and managing director of USC Consulting Group’s global mining and metals practice. “One lever of control in the SIOP process is to make inventory harder working as a strategic tool.“

Adding inventory into the mix is just one additional step, but we find it can be the key to the whole process. When you’re focusing on inventory, it requires more careful planning and elevates the entire planning process up a notch. When your inventory is optimized, which is not an easy mark to hit in these days of supply chain disruption, things tend to fall into place. With SIOP, you can make your inventory work harder for you.

You will learn the principles of SIOP that include:

The Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning process assists USC Consulting Group in helping our clients become more efficient, profitable and competitive. If you’d like to find out more, contact us today.

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