The S&OP meeting that nobody owns
Sales & Operations Planning fails not because of bad data or the wrong software. It fails because the meeting on the calendar and the actual decision-making happen in different rooms.
There is a meeting in most companies called Sales & Operations Planning. It is on the calendar. It has a recurring invite, a slide deck template, a facilitator who sends reminders, and an executive sponsor whose name appears on the process documentation. The meeting happens every month, sometimes every week. The numbers go in. The numbers come out. Action items are noted.
The decisions are made somewhere else.
This is the central problem with S&OP that no software vendor will tell you, no consulting firm's implementation methodology addresses directly, and no amount of data quality improvement will fix. The meeting exists. The process exists. The ownership does not.
What S&OP is supposed to do
The framework is well-established. S&OP, in its canonical form as described by Oliver Wight and refined by Tom Wallace in the late 1980s, is a monthly management process that reconciles demand, supply, and financial plans into a single integrated number that the whole business operates from. The goal is one plan — not a commercial plan, a supply plan, and a finance plan that are loosely aligned and quietly contradicted by everyone.
The logic is elegant. Demand management feeds unconstrained demand signals. Supply planning confirms what can actually be delivered. Finance translates both into P&L impact. The executive S&OP meeting reviews the gap between what the business wants to do and what it can do, makes decisions about which gaps to close and how, and communicates those decisions downstream.
In the Oliver Wight maturity model, a Class A S&OP process achieves 95%+ plan adherence — meaning the plan agreed in S&OP is the plan the business executes. Real companies achieving Class A performance report 15–25% reduction in inventory, 20–30% improvement in customer service levels, and material reduction in expediting costs.
The gap between this and what most companies actually run is where the real story is.
The data on S&OP maturity
Oliver Wight's own benchmarking data, drawn from assessments of over 5,000 companies globally, finds that fewer than 10% of companies achieve Class A S&OP performance. The majority sit at Class C or below — a level characterised by departmental plans that are loosely connected, forecast accuracy below 70%, and executive involvement that is nominal rather than decision-making.
A 2022 Gartner survey of 400 supply chain executives found that only 37% rated their S&OP process as effective at aligning cross-functional decisions. The same survey found that the #1 cited barrier to S&OP effectiveness was not technology, not data quality, not process design — it was lack of leadership commitment and cross-functional trust.
A 2023 IBF (Institute of Business Forecasting) study of 250 companies found that 68% of S&OP participants described the monthly meeting as a "review" rather than a "decision" forum. The distinction is critical. A review forum presents information and records what happened. A decision forum changes what will happen. Most S&OP meetings are elaborate status reports.
APICS (now ASCM) reported in its 2022 Supply Chain Resilience Report that companies with mature S&OP processes recovered from supply disruptions 2.3x faster than companies with immature processes — but also noted that achieving maturity required an average of 3–5 years of sustained executive involvement, not a software implementation.
The three places where the real decisions actually get made
If the S&OP meeting is not where decisions happen, where do they happen? In the organisations I've worked in and alongside, consistently three places:
The bilateral between Sales and the CEO. In most commercially-driven organisations, the senior sales leader has direct access to the CEO in a way that the supply chain director does not. When a major customer threatens to delist a product, that conversation does not wait for the monthly S&OP cycle. The CEO calls the supply chain VP and tells them to make it work. The S&OP process is then informed, post facto, of a decision already made. The demand signal was always the CEO's relationship with the top account, not the statistical forecast.
The Finance QBR. Quarterly business reviews owned by Finance have, in most large companies, more executive attention and more decision-making authority than S&OP does. The reason is accountability: the QBR connects directly to the P&L and the board. S&OP connects to the operational plan, which is one step removed from what the CFO is asked about on earnings calls. When Finance and S&OP produce different numbers — and they usually do — Finance wins, because Finance is where the accountability is attached.
The plant manager's phone call. At the execution end, the decision about what actually gets made is often the plant manager's interpretation of a constrained situation, communicated to procurement and logistics informally. The S&OP plan said X. The reality is Y. The plant manager calls the procurement manager and they sort it out. S&OP is updated to reflect what happened, not what was decided.
The S&OP meeting, in this architecture, is not the decision forum. It is the reconciliation forum — the place where the various bilaterals, informal calls, and executive overrides are summarised into a coherent narrative for the record.
Why the ownership problem is structural
The ownership problem in S&OP is not a personality failure. It is a structural consequence of how S&OP sits in the organisational hierarchy.
S&OP spans every major function — commercial, supply, finance, HR, sometimes R&D. But it is usually owned by supply chain. The S&OP process manager reports to the VP of Supply Chain. The process documentation lives in supply chain. The system of record is a supply chain system (SAP APO, IBP, Kinaxis, o9).
This creates an immediate credibility problem. When supply chain owns the process but cannot compel commercial or finance to comply with it, the process depends entirely on voluntary participation by functions with their own priorities, their own metrics, and their own reporting lines. Commercial is measured on revenue. Finance is measured on working capital. Supply chain is measured on service levels and inventory turns. These metrics are not aligned. When S&OP tries to produce a single integrated plan, it is asking functions to subordinate their local metric to a cross-functional outcome that none of them own individually.
Without executive ownership — meaning an executive who is personally accountable for the quality of the S&OP output and who has the authority to enforce cross-functional compliance — the process defaults to the path of least resistance: a meeting that reviews what already happened and calls itself planning.
A 2021 Deloitte study of S&OP transformations found that the single highest-impact variable for S&OP success was whether the CEO or COO personally chairs the executive S&OP meeting — not whether the company has invested in planning software, not whether they have hired a dedicated S&OP director, not whether they have implemented a formal pre-S&OP review cycle. The chair matters more than the tool.
The consultant's playbook and why it doesn't work
Every major consulting firm has an S&OP transformation offering. The standard playbook runs roughly: assess current maturity against a reference model, design a future-state process, implement supporting technology, run a change management programme, stabilise and hand over.
The problem is not that the playbook is wrong. It is that it assumes the organisational antibodies can be overcome by process design and good change management. They usually cannot.
The antibodies are specific. The commercial director who has been running a shadow forecast in Excel for three years does not abandon it because the new S&OP process has a cleaner system. The forecast is not just a number — it is the basis of his bonus conversation with the CEO, and he trusts his own numbers more than he trusts the statistical model. Getting him to commit to the S&OP number means asking him to stake his compensation on a process he didn't design and a model he doesn't fully understand.
The finance controller who produces a budget in Q4 and is then asked to reconcile it monthly against a rolling S&OP forecast does not naturally align these processes. The budget is the accountability document. The S&OP forecast is an operational tool. Making them speak the same language requires either reengineering the budget process (a Finance initiative, not a supply chain one) or living with permanent reconciliation overhead.
These are not problems that a new data model or a better tool solves. They are problems of incentive misalignment, and they require executive mandate — not consulting engagement — to resolve.
McKinsey's 2022 analysis of 60 S&OP transformations found that 72% of transformations that achieved initial success regressed within two years when executive sponsorship weakened or the sponsoring executive left the company. The process is not self-sustaining. It requires continuous executive energy to maintain cross-functional participation.
What a real decision-making S&OP looks like
I have seen it work in one large organisation, properly. The conditions were unusual but instructive.
The COO chaired the executive S&OP personally and did not delegate it. She asked hard questions in the meeting and visibly held people accountable for the answers. When the commercial team brought a demand number that was inconsistent with the statistical baseline, she asked why, and she did not accept "the market is complex" as an answer. When supply planning said they couldn't meet a demand scenario, she asked what it would cost to close the gap, and she made the resource decision in the room.
The result was that pre-S&OP preparation became serious. Functions that had previously sent analysts to the preparatory meetings started sending directors. The forecast accuracy improved not because the statistical model got better — it got marginally better — but because commercial stopped sandbagging and finance stopped layering in contingency. When people knew the COO was going to ask about their number, they made the number honest.
The three things that distinguished this process from a review forum:
- Decisions were made in the room with accountability. Not "we'll take that offline" — a named person with a deadline and a consequence for missing it.
- The financial bridge was live. Every scenario was translated into gross margin impact in real time, so decisions were made with P&L visibility rather than in operational isolation.
- The process had teeth. Once a number was agreed in S&OP, changing it outside the S&OP cycle required explicit executive approval. The commercial team could not quietly update the forecast in the CRM and expect supply to follow.
The chair matters more than the tool.
Deloitte S&OP Transformation Study, 2021The uncomfortable thesis
S&OP is not a supply chain process. It is a general management process that supply chain has, historically, been tasked with running — with insufficient authority to make it work.
The organisations that run S&OP well treat it as the CEO's operational management system, not a tool for supply chain to align commercial. The CEO owns the integrated plan. Supply chain runs the mechanics. Commercial, finance, and operations participate because they are accountable to the plan, not because supply chain asked them nicely.
Until that ownership is explicit and enforced from the top, most S&OP processes will continue to be what they currently are: well-documented, well-attended, and almost entirely advisory.
Sources
- Wallace, T. F., & Stahl, R. A. (2008). Sales & Operations Planning: The How-To Handbook. T.F. Wallace & Company.
- Oliver Wight International. (2022). The Oliver Wight Class A Checklist for Business Excellence. 7th edition.
- Oliver Wight International. (2023). S&OP Benchmarking Survey. Oliver Wight.
- Gartner. (2022). "Survey Analysis: Supply Chain Planning Effectiveness." Gartner Research.
- IBF — Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning. (2023). S&OP Best Practices Survey. IBF.
- ASCM (formerly APICS). (2022). Supply Chain Resilience Report. ASCM.
- Deloitte. (2021). "S&OP: Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution." Deloitte Consulting LLP.
- McKinsey & Company. (2022). "Why S&OP Transformations Stall — and How to Restart Them." McKinsey Operations Practice.
- Lapide, L. (2005). "Sales and Operations Planning Part I: The Process." The Journal of Business Forecasting. 24(3).
- Thomé, A. M. T., et al. (2012). "Sales and operations planning: A research synthesis." International Journal of Production Economics. 138(1).