Improving the Sales and Operations Planning process at a Swedish dairy company

Abstract: Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) has for long been a topic of interest in many industries, the structured way of planning and matching supply with demand has proved to be successful in many cases. However, achieving all the benefits that it can offer can be a difficult task. This master thesis has sought to guide a Swedish dairy company in their goal to improve their current S&OP process, firstly by investigating How the newly implemented process of S&OP in the cheese category is performing and further on by exploring What the dairy company needs to improve and develop in order to be successful in their S&OP process. A traditional view presented in literature has been followed in order to find all areas that are essential to achieve the benefits presented. Five key aspects of S&OP are identified, and these have served as a basis throughout the master thesis. They are Leadership, Focus on the people, Incentives and Key Performance Indicators, Communication and information sharing and Rules and guidelines. In order to investigate the current process, a thorough case study constituted of interviews with a wide range of representatives from the company was performed. This case study showed that the current process was inadequate in many ways. The most obvious ones were the lack of meetings and the discontent amongst the employees with the inefficiency of the meetings that actually were held. This led to a gap analysis in which the gaps between literature and the current process were identified. It also led to a positioning in a maturity framework where the company was positioned on a low level of maturity due to the malfunctioning process. The suggested process contains five steps and five meetings following the traditional process of S&OP, apart from some adjustments that has been made in order to match the needs and demands from the company. In the proposal, one can find inputs, agendas, outputs and participants for each step. Following the proposed solution is an implementation plan constituting of the three phases: Educational phase, Process initiation phase and Continuous improvement and monitoring phase. The authors recommend the company to follow the suggested solution and implementation in order to advance in the maturity framework and hence improve their S&OP process.