Leading Through Change: The Human Side of S&O
By Stephen Ashton, CEO
Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is often hailed as a strategic process that aligns supply and demand, integrates financial planning, and improves customer service. But the reality inside many organisations tells a different story – one of functional silos, legacy data, conflicting priorities, and resistance to change.
Drawing from lived experience and real business transformations, here’s an honest look at the challenges with S&OP, why leadership mindset matters, and how a more agile, data-informed approach – like what we’re building at Puddle – offers hope for a better future.
The Challenge with Optimising S&OP Processes
At its core, S&OP should provide a single, unified version of the truth – but many organisations struggle to even define that truth.
One reason for this is that often, we find that different departments operate with different objectives, for example:
- Sales wants stock availability to hit revenue targets.
- Operations focuses on cost-efficiency and capacity management.
- Finance seeks to optimise working capital and Return on Investment (ROI)
These conflicting goals can create functional silos where each team optimises for its own performance measures. The result? Misalignment, duplicated effort, stock issues (either too much or not enough), and missed opportunities.
Even when businesses do attempt to implement an S&OP process, it’s often layered over fragmented systems and legacy data – leaving no one with a full, clear view of what’s actually happening.
Know Your Problem: What Are You Actually Trying to Fix?
Many S&OP programmes fail because they jump straight into solutions without defining the actual problem.
Ask ten leaders in a business what they want from S&OP and you’ll hear ten different things – for example, reducing working capital, improving availability, cutting logistics costs, increasing forecasting accuracy, and simplifying planning.
The real challenge is getting absolute clarity from the top: What is the single most important problem you are trying to solve? Until that question is answered, any process or tool risks becoming noise.
In one case, a business was obsessing over container costs from Asia – while ignoring critical availability gaps in best-selling lines. That’s the kind of misplaced focus that S&OP should correct – but only if the right question is asked at the start.
Why Management Culture and Ways of Working Make or Break S&OP
Even the most advanced S&OP process will fail without the right leadership culture.
S&OP demands collaboration, but many organisations still reward functional success, not cross-functional outcomes. The result? Protective behaviours, turf wars and long-standing rituals that substitute real planning with familiar, informal workarounds
A true transformation starts at the top, with board-level clarity on what matters. But it doesn’t end there. Leadership must also create space for insight from all levels, listening to people who’ve been running processes for decades and understand where things break. People first, process second.
And perhaps most importantly, leaders need the humility to accept that no one person has all the answers – and that sustainable S&OP success comes from shared ownership, not command-and-control.
The Data Challenge: More Than a Technical Problem
Everyone talks about being “data-driven”, but in most S&OP environments, data is the biggest challenge – not the enabler.
At Visku, we’ve seen firsthand how often data becomes the biggest blocker in S&OP — even though everyone talks about being “data-driven.” In many of the organisations we’ve supported, the challenges are familiar:
- Multiple ERP systems with inconsistent product definitions
- Legacy systems that don’t integrate or export usable data
- Inaccessible or missing data across key supply chain points (like manufacturing through to port movements)
- Teams spend more time cleaning and formatting data than actually generating insights
The result is usually a fractured view of stock, demand, and performance — often pieced together in personal spreadsheets maintained by “Excel experts.”
True progress happens when we automate the repetitive work, free up experts to focus on insights, and accept that you don’t need 100% perfect data to make good decisions. Confident thinking – not perfectionism – is what unlocks agility.
Changing Perceptions: Bringing in Agile Ways of Working
One of the biggest myths in traditional S&OP is that it needs to be a slow, bureaucratic process. But there’s a better way – and it starts with agile principles.
From experience, this looks like:
- Cross-functional collaboration and daily standups
- Retrospectives to identify what’s working
- Clear ownership of outputs, not just inputs
- Frequent iterations rather than static monthly cycles
But here’s the catch: agility needs authority. Without a single accountable owner – often at board level – agile ways of working risk collapsing under functional pressures (“That’s not my budget”, “I can’t carry the stock”, etc.).
When done right, agile S&OP breaks down silos, builds trust, and aligns everyone to shared goals.
What We’re Doing – Puddle, the Great Hope
At Visku we focus on not building another dashboard or forecasting tool. We’re rethinking the whole architectural approach to S&OP, through digital twin technology and Puddle.
Here’s how:
- People-first: We start with collaboration, not tech. We bring experts from across the business together, set shared objectives, and build trust.
- Automated ingestion: We use modern tech to pull data from multiple systems and standardise it into a usable central bank, without demanding perfection.
- Translation layer: We convert technical data into insight-ready formats for planners, sales teams, and finance to act on.
- Focus on confidence, not control: You don’t need 100% accuracy to make decisions – you need trusted signals at a high enough confidence level to reduce risk.
- Cultural change baked in: We run daily check-ins, and design cross-functional objectives that force alignment.
We’re inspired by the way the financial services sector handles data at scale – and we’re applying those lessons to S&OP. Our mission? To reduce effort on data manipulation and increase effort on decision-making.
Because what we’re really supporting isn’t just better supply chains – it’s organisations that think ahead, move with purpose, and turn possibility into progress.
Final Thoughts
S&OP can be a game-changer – but only if it’s rooted in clarity, collaboration, and cultural alignment. The process itself is not the answer. It’s a catalyst for asking the right questions, bringing the right people together, and making the best use of data.
And with Puddle, we believe there’s a better way forward.