Avercast Sales & Operational Planning (S&OP)

Avercast sales and operations planning, or S&OP, provides several departments and/or roles in a company with a cohesive way to plan with and around each other. Our S&OP software applies several sales and operations best practices to quickly see a visual representation of how each department is planning.

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The Avercast sales and operations planning software contains 3 distinct sections that represent an inventory plan, operations plan, and a sales plan. These 3 sections are displayed side-by-side to compare and contrast the plan of each department. The inspiration of developing the S&OP software was derived due to the belief that the sales and operations planning process is integral in optimising the supply chain of a company.

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The first analysis that the sales and operations planning provides is a budget report that is based on data in the supply planning software section of Avercast. In this report, you’re able to see a comparison between the planned budget and the actual budget with both of those represented, along with the calculated variance of those two figures. This allows you to see how accurate your planned budget has been compared to your actual spend.

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The next analysis the sales and operations planning software provides is a sales report based on data in historical data stored both in your ERP system, and in the demand forecasting software module. This report shows you a comparison between your forecast sales and your actual sales figures, again with the variance calculated to show how accurate your sales plan was compared to your actual sales.

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Then the solution provides an operations report based on scheduled orders compared to actual orders compared to planned orders. This information comes from different places within the Avercast software and, in certain situations, from outside software providers to provide insight into how effective your current planning is.

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The goal is not solely to improve the sales and operations planning process by providing comparisons between plans and actuals, but to go a step further by providing valuable insight into how each of these three reports compare to one another. An operations department looking at the forecast budget of a finance department and the forecast sales of a sales department allows them to plan more closely to how these departments intend to plan.

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This sort of sales and operations planning comparison goes both ways and allows any employee from any department to gain valuable insight in how they can plan more effectively around the other departments, providing a visual explanation of each departments production. This can be especially useful for management as well when making decisions on resource allocation and optimizing that process just as our supply planning order optimizer optimizes inventory.

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Each of these factors, along with several other useful features unique to each company’s specific situation, have led to sales and operations best practices along with a better sales and operations software product for our customers. This sales and operations planning tool is a great report to facilitate conversation between departments that are based on actual data and direct comparisons in one place.