Many businesses, large and small, have a huge source of great ideas that can help them improve, innovate, and grow, and yet so many of these companies never think of using this amazing corporate asset. What is this highly valuable asset? Its own people.

The teams focused their efforts on a few of the highest-value S&OP levers in order to review the current planning process, identify gaps in the planning infrastructure and analytically understand demand and supply variability.

Says Morgan Fraud, the author of The Thinking Corporation, “Given that we are all capable of contributing new ideas, the question becomes how do you successfully generate, capture, process and implement ideas?” Becoming an organization capable of answering this question can benefit in a number of ways

In particular, the initial state of the company’s sales and operations planning capabilities limited their ability to account for demand variability or raw material lead times in production and distribution. Improve sales and operations and production planning.