Articles

Challenges Creating Sales Team’s Input to S&OP 

Something we hear about consistently is the adoption of Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) in which the sales team provides an input to the consensus forecast.  We also heard that adoption of this process added new tasks for their teams, and new tools… usually spreadsheets.  These spreadsheets require creation and maintenance, and have inherent risk of corruption, unwanted modification, and accidental deletion.      

A New Capability to Help  

BluePlanner TPM’s “bottom-up” account planning and trade promotion management (TPM) use has been augmented. The platform now offers a service linked with TPM for the creation of the sales team’s input into S&OP.   

We start with the bottom-up sales plans built in TPM.  Trade Marketing/Sales Planning teams or other functions (e.g. marketing…or even demand planning) then capture their +/- changes to that forecast in categories we call “Building Blocks.”   

The output of this functionality ranges from the sales team’s input to the consensus forecast to the consensus forecast itself.  We call this service BluePlanner IBP …Integrated Business Planning.  

Structure, Control, Speed & Insight 

Instead of manually combining the data you need to create your forecast, we leverage a significant amount of information already available, and import new data sources you want added.  This data is then presented on reports, curated dashboards, and the forecast interface to give you fast access to the most up-to-date information used in the creation of your forecast.  Finally, you can export the forecast and save version(s) as “snapshots” for future reference.  

Cross-functional teams can collaborate either by all working in BluePlanner, or through the sharing of the data that connects them. 

With BluePlanner IBP, the pain points associated with executing this process offline are reduced or eliminated.  The tool that already captures customer sales and spending forecasts is extended for this additional use case.