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I am writing you a long letter because I don't have time to write a short one.   Les Provinciales   -   Blaise Pascal. All practitioners of S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) around the world know perfectly well: the greatest difficulty in the challenging art of S&OP is to extract crucial conversations in order to make decisions or to ask management to do so when the issue falls outside the scope of our responsibilities. This may seem obvious, but practice shows that many S

"At the time, we called it Production Planning. Then came Company Game Planning. Dick Ling later came up with the term S&OP" -   André Martin, father of DRP For decades, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has helped companies connect the dots from forecasting to execution. But in today’s volatile world, monthly meetings and rigid playbooks are no longer sufficient. We are now entering the era of   Game Planning   — and it changes everything. S&OP Isn’t Broken — But It Needs a

When the sea was calm all boats alike, showed mastership in floating -   Shakespeare, Coriolanus Why Understanding S&OP is like reading An Instance of the Fingerpost Understanding S&OP is a bit like reading   An Instance of the Fingerpost ,   Iain Pears’ masterpiece : there are multiple narrators, multiple versions of the truth—and yet no single, definitive storyline. Over the past 40 years, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has been adopted, rebranded, misunderstood, and of

Yesterday, I was delivering an   S&OP conference   for the   Finance Leaders of a major food company . As always, one topic inevitably came to the table —   Gap Management . And it triggered a   passionate   debate. In Business Planning terms, the   gap between the latest view and the objective   is often perceived as a   problem . In the art of   Sales & Operations Planning , it’s actually the   solution . Because as   Michael Kami   brilliantly described in   Trigger Points

1) My unexpected Journey in S&OP During my 30 years’ experience in S&OP implementation, for 20 of them I was privileged to collaborate directly with Andy Coldrick, co-creator with Dick Ling of Breakthrough S&OP, sometimes called IBP. Andy was my master and friend, and among the immense knowledge he taught me on S&OP, the standout message is that S&OP is much more than a process: properly implemented, it is a way of working for the whole company that enables it to deploy dynam

Learn why traditional strategy models fall short in a VUCA world and how the ‘Strategy Game’ approach uses dynamic thinking and collective learning to build resilient, adaptive business strategies.

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The COVID-19 crisis has shown the importance of the Agile methods, by necessity. But it has also exposed their limits because the magnitude and the complexity of that crisis have shown that in a world that is no longer simply VUCA, but now Protean (who, like Proteus in the Odyssey, transforms itself all the time); it is now vital to process quickly and at the same time, the short term AND the long term. However, by philosophy, the Agile method prefers the short term, by man