Here's a Q&A that might be helpful to understand what can be done inside S&OP.
Financial plans are one input into S&OP. Question: The level of planning for a financial plan is usually different to the planning levels in SCM (similar to promotions). How is a financial plan integrated into S&OP in general?
The financial plan (e.g. from BPC) is always needed for an S&OP process and is usually higher level or just as granular but in a different way. We can bring these plans in no matter what the level is and compare it common levels with operational plans (this is a key requirement for S&OP). The financial plans are usually brought in via HCI once a month (or quarter).
Sales plans. I assume they have a separate tool to S&OP to do their sales plans. How are sales plans integrated, as it is again not really focusing on SCM planning levels? In certain cases sales planners work also within S&OP – question: Are they doing double work in such a case (creating the sales plan in an external system and again – maybe at a higher level – in S&OP)?
Often the Sales plan/forecast is the same level as the consensus plan and this can come from another system. However often customers build a sales plan/forecast in IBP/S&OP since this solution is designed to make it easy to collaborate and manage a high quality sales forecast. The sales forecast often is a bottom-up quantity and price forecast by customer and product, with revenue being calculated and used in the S&OP process.
Supply side. Can you do finite planning within S&OP for supply planning (not having the IBP Supply model in usage)? If YES, how do you re-distribute the overload to other factories?
In the S&OP application, we can model a supply chain with multiple levels of locations, BOM and capacity resources. With an unconstrained heuristic, a planner can quickly understand where issues are and adjust sourcing ratios and other parts of the supply plan. A constrained heuristic can also be used to resolve and respect various supply chain constraints.