Implementing a SIOP Process

A Sales, Inventory and Operations Planning (SIOP) business process is an essential element for running a successful business.  SIOP will allow you to improve your forecasting, capacity and resource planning, cash flow, and inventory levels.

When you’re part of a company that manages a lot of inventory, it’s easy for departments to get siloed, especially as you grow. It’s common for organizations to want to create some sort of top-down view of their products, using things like product categories, subcategories, brand, family, etc.  Equally as common has been the frequent desire to forecast not just by item-and-warehouse, but at an even lower fine-grained level, by customers, or groups of customers, all of which StockIQ Technologies supports.

With the rise of SIOP where you’re adding sales folks to operations and inventory planning, we’re seeing a variation in this approach among our customer base.

Oftentimes, salespeople are out there just sort of winging it. Then you have Operations trying to plan inventory totally in the dark about what the salespeople are actually doing.  Information gets lost, promises get made, and customers can become upset.

Implementing a SIOP process takes some concerted effort, but the payoffs in aligning all aspects of the organization can be quite profound. Imagine having Sales, Operations, Accounting, and all stakeholders on the same page!

So what we’re finding is that more and more organizations are looking to stand the normal ops-focused hierarchy on its head, in that we will configure their hierarchy of attributes based on customer-associated properties first – customer region, customer group, and that sort of thing – and things like brand and warehouse number second

This means that as a demand planner, the input you’re going to get from your sales team will not be at the individual SKU level, and certainly not down to the SKU-location level – you’re often lucky to get down to even a sub-category level of detail for what they think that account will do this year.

This type of flexibility allows for a much more SIOP integrated approach, while still allowing for the top-down + bottom-up approach StockIQ is known for.

SIOP has proven to be extraordinarily important and invaluable.  Once you get past all of the growing pains of a SIOP implementation you will see results almost instantly. Where are you and your organization when it comes to SIOP?  Long-since implemented, or investigating its benefits as your organization grows? Contact us today!

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