Kiran Saindane, Product Strategy Director at Oracle, gave a presentation about how Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud (S&OP) enables organizations to implement a continuous and forward-looking S&OP process. The goal is to profitably align product, demand and supply plans with your strategic and financial objectives.Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud is part of the Unified SCP Cloud Suite, but it is a stand-alone solution.

Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud is designed to help customers consistently and profitably execute strategy with enterprise-wide alignment. The system follows an Align, Analyze, Act design that enables customers to achieve four core goals:

• Align the enterprise
• Make better decisions
• Achieve business goals
• Evolve the business process

Ultimately, the first three points will help you achieve the fourth.

Align the Enterprise

With Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud, customers can align their enterprise with best practices processes and collaboration. Some tips for achieving this include:

• Quickly adopt a best practices process following the five stages of S&OP (Executive Review, Financial Review, Product Review, Demand Review, and Supply Review)
• Take a systematic approach to identifying and resolving performance gaps
• Stay on track by monitoring action items and decision items
• Reach consensus by involving key stakeholders across the organization

Once you align your enterprise, you’ll be able to harness collective knowledge using social collaboration, provide accountability using planning notes, and arrive at a consensus plan.

Make Better Decisions

Better decisions can be made using embedded analytics within Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud. Some tips for making better decisions with these analytics include:

• Use best practices layouts for the five stages of S&OP (i.e. seeded dashboards and detailed analyses)
• Stay on course using best practices KPIs (i.e. performance thresholds to trigger corrective action and management by exception)
• Determine root causes of gaps by drilling into details

This will enable customers to modify or create new analyses for unique needs and create new measures that are tailored to your business.

Achieve Business Goals

Customers can achieve business goals by acting on new plans. With Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud, customers can evaluate alternative plans using a rapid in-line simulation that lets you run alternative supply plans to respond to changing conditions. You can also rerun forecasts within S&OP Cloud. In addition, customers can:

• Plan strategic capacity needs with aggregate planning
• Evaluate the impact of new plans to select the best one
• Link S&OP decisions with overall business planning
• Collect data from external sources
• Integrate S&OP Cloud with other Oracle Cloud solutions (not a packaged integration—it requires custom integration)

New Features and Roadmap

There have been several new features delivered in recent releases to help enhance Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud. Releases are delivered on a quarterly basis to encourage continuous improvement. The enhancements in these releases are designed to provide customers with an improved process and better decision-making. Some of the latest features include:

• Secured access for collaboration
• Ability to enforce capacity constraints for product categories and WorkCenters
• Aggregate data for non-key customers
• Ability to compare planned vs. actual in real-time
• Demand simulations
• Ability to monitor planning processes and data

Now that you’ve gotten an overview, head over to this deep dive video to better learn how to utilize Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud

In addition to current features, there are also plans for the next release of Oracle Sales and Operations Planning Cloud in addition to future roadmap items in the works. The current releases of S&OP Cloud feature capabilities that enable constraint-based aggregate planning and analysis of aggregate planning for the entire Supply Chain. The next steps for S&OP include the ability to configure S&OP cycle stages and a simplified Supply Chain network definition. In terms of future roadmap items, the plan for S&OP Cloud includes improved S&OP process management and integrations to PBCS, Sales, and Innovation Cloud.