Monthly S&OP | Balancing and Executive Review: How to Stop Strategic Decisions Being Made on the Warehouse Floor | Ep. 24

Most supply chain organisations can produce a demand plan.
Many can build a supply plan.

Where the wheels tend to come off is in the two weeks that follow, the balancing week, where you reconcile what the business wants with what it can actually produce, and the executive S&OP, where senior leaders are asked to commit to the trade-offs.
Skip these two steps, and strategic decisions quietly slip to whoever shouts the loudest in the warehouse or the sales region. Keep them, and your planning starts connecting to your strategy.

In this second installment of the S&OP MasterClass from Roima, Søren Hammer Pedersen sits down again with Benjamin Obling, COO of PERITO IBP, to walk through weeks three and four of the classical S&OP process.

The conversation moves from practical visualisation tricks (a simple green, amber, red capacity grid will take you surprisingly far) to the more political work of getting C-level executives to give guidance instead of reactive orders.

If you plan supply chains for a living, or you carry the CFO, CCO or CEO title and find yourself making scattered, one-off calls on inventory, service levels and market priorities, this episode will give you a clear mental model for how those decisions should be surfaced, framed and committed to inside a monthly rhythm.

Chapters
00:00 Cold open, the cost of skipping the balancing step
01:23 Welcome to the S&OP MasterClass and recap of part one
03:28 The four weeks of the S&OP process at a glance
05:56 Why weeks three and four actually matter
11:07 Visualising capacity, bottlenecks and stock projections
18:01 Extending the footprint to include your suppliers
20:23 Running the balancing meeting and handing over to sales
22:23 Deciding what to mitigate now and what to escalate
27:10 The purpose of the executive S&OP meeting
29:01 How to motivate the C-level to show up
35:16 Turning decisions into operational plans the same week
37:58 The fifth step, adhering to the plan you just agreed
42:07 Getting started without inventing the wheel

Production
This podcast is brought to you by Roima.
This podcast is produced by Montanus.