A Brief history of S&OP

Alain Perrot
Jan 14
6 min read

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 often oversimplified. Depending on who you ask, it’s a process, a meeting, a forecasting tool—or a supply chain ritual. But beneath the surface, for those who have practiced it deeply, S&OP reveals itself as something else entirely: a transformational way of working.

After 33 years of experience in S&OP, the immense privilege of collaborating for many years with the two authentic fathers of S&OP—Dick Ling and Andy Coldrick—over 200 implementations, and work across 60 countries on all continents except Antarctica, here’s what I’ve learned: S&OP is not universal—it is always contextual, and always evolving.

To quote Montaigne in the introduction of his Essays:

“I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary manner... for it is myself I portray.”

The First Law: There Is No Truth—Only Your Truth

Early in my career, I observed what I later coined The Troubadour Effect. A well-meaning newcomer joins a company and says: “In my previous company, we did S&OP like this—and it was amazing.” Suddenly, months of internal progress are upended in favor of a nostalgic, packaged “truth.”

That’s how fragile S&OP can be. Because the first truth of S&OP is this: there is no truth. There is no standard template. True S&OP must be a bespoke solution to the company's structure, culture, and ambition.

In your S&OP design: don’t copy paste someone else’s system—build your own, which does not mean reinventing the wheel. Steal with pride what makes sense and adapt the rest to your needs.

The Second Law: Practice Before Perfection

Too many leaders spend months designing S&OP without ever doing it. But S&OP is not learned in theory. It is learned in practice. Start small, start messy, but start now.

Yes, the beginning will be chaotic. The meetings will be rough. The numbers might not match. That’s the point. Through the act of doing, your team will discover what no manual can teach.

But beware of confusing process with purpose.

As Steve Jobs once warned in the famous Content versus Process Video:

“People get confused. Companies get confused when they start getting bigger. They want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, well, somehow there's some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content.”

The process is your chrysalis. The butterfly is your team aligned, empowered, and focused on a single shared goal.

In S&OP language: “Butterfly means People over Process—with an 80/20 rule of thumb.” Build structure, but serve people first.

The Third Law: Education Is Not Optional

If practicing S&OP is essential, then so is educating people. Not everyone enters the process with the same understanding—or enthusiasm. But everyone must feel ownership.

That’s why I recommend starting with a game. A simulation like Value Race. Something that creates connection, not confusion. As I often say: “Games came before culture.” They unite teams in ways PowerPoint never will. They create what S&OP needs most: esprit de corps.

The Fourth Law: No Leader, No Journey

Recently, a client asked me: “Can we implement S&OP without an S&OP leader?”

My answer was simple: this isn’t a law—it’s ground zero.

Without a dedicated S&OP leader, don’t bother. Forget about S&OP

The same rule applies to the GM/CEO. Too often, executives give their blessing and then disappear. That’s not leadership. That’s resignation disguised as delegation.

The GM/CEO must chair the S&OP meeting, steer decisions, and champion the journey. Their absence signals irrelevance. Their presence transforms the room.

The Fifth Law: S&OP Is a Decision-Making Machine

S&OP is not about alignment for alignment’s sake. It is about making better decisions—faster, together, and with clarity, at the right level in the organization. Forecasts and plans are inputs. The outcome is action.

To quote Peter Drucker:

“Most discussions of decision making assume that only senior executives make decisions or that only senior executives' decisions matter. This is a dangerous mistake.”

The S&OP team’s job is to frame the problem clearly, provide multiple options, evaluate risks and trade-offs, make decisions where they are empowered to do so, and support executive commitment to action. Without decisions, there is no S&OP—only theatre.

The Sixth Law: Assume Nothing, Believe Nobody, Check Everything

With experience comes speed—but also risk. You see patterns. You make assumptions. But every business is different. Every implementation is unique. And in today’s world, where AI lets us prototype “embryonic S&OP” systems almost instantly, the temptation to move fast—and assume too much—is real.

Don’t.

Use your experience to spot risks. But always return to first principles. Assume nothing. Believe nobody. Check and challenge everything.

The Seventh Law: If You’re Not Hurt, It’s Not Real

My introduction to S&OP was dramatic—what I call my personal crucifixion. The owner of the company came to France and declared, in front of 200 top managers: "Business Planning people are killing my business."

I was the only Business Planning person in the room.

Yet the message wasn’t a personal attack. The real message was this: Instead of simply extrapolating that things will continue to get worse when they’re already bad—make the future happen, whatever the circumstances.

That moment marked the inception of S&OP in the company. Two years later, that pain transformed into one of my first major S&OP successes.

The beginning was painful. It was difficult. People struggled to understand its meaning. Data was missing. But we were moving—and progressing. For me, it was a resurrection.

Why the difficulty? Because real S&OP is not a process rollout. It is the creation of a new order.

As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince:

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new order of things; for the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.”

If you’re not facing internal resistance, cultural pushback, or personal discomfort, you haven’t begun. Without friction, you are merely performing an illusion of the journey—checking boxes without changing anything real.

The Eighth Law: No Miracles, Only Movement

One GM once told me S&OP was the “Destop Effect” (S&OP even unclogs your pipes!)—people started to believe it could solve every problem in the company.

Let me be clear: S&OP is not Jesus Christ. It doesn’t perform miracles. It can’t fix broken business models or make poor leadership disappear.

But it can do something better: bring coherence. Align teams. Clarify decisions. Turn strategy into action.

The Ninth Law: S&OP Is a Living System

S&OP was born 40 years ago as a supply chain tool. It has since evolved into a company-wide, strategy-execution engine. It continues to change, and its Future would be STRATAGAME: see my article on this topic.

That’s why we must revisit the rules—including these nine. Because the moment we believe we’ve “mastered S&OP,” we’ve already fallen behind.

S&OP is not a process to be completed. It’s a discipline to be lived.