Sales and operations planning is described in books and vendor material as a five-step monthly cycle with a demand planning team, a supply review, a pre-meeting and an executive meeting. It is a sound discipline for a large manufacturer. A company of fifty people with a sales lead, a plant manager and a controller reads the description and concludes it is not for them.
We think the idea is for them, in a much smaller form. A small manufacturer needs one meeting a month and three numbers on the same horizon. The meeting is the easy part. The three numbers are the work.
Demand. What the business expects to ship over the next several months: orders in hand, plus the forecast for what is likely to arrive. For a small manufacturer the forecast can be a short list built by the sales lead from the pipeline and from repeat customers' habits, adjusted for what the sales lead knows about this quarter.
Capacity. What the plant can make over the same months, in a unit the plant manager can defend: machine hours, labor hours or units of the constrained operation. Capacity changes with shifts, absences, maintenance and the mix of products, so the number comes with the assumptions behind it.
Projected inventory. What the company will hold at the end of each month if it builds to the plan: starting stock, plus production, plus receipts, minus shipments. It includes the materials, because a plan that needs a part that arrives in six weeks is not a plan.
Put the three side by side on one horizon, say the next four months, and the gaps show up. Demand exceeds capacity in month two. Inventory of a component runs out in month three. Capacity sits idle in month four while demand is thin.
When the three numbers are agreed, the meeting has one job: decide what to do about each gap. The options are a short list. Add capacity, with overtime, an extra shift or a subcontractor. Move demand, by offering a later date to a customer who can take it or pulling forward one who can. Change the mix, building what the plant makes best first. Carry inventory in advance of a peak. Or accept the gap and tell the customer.
Each decision gets an owner and a date, and it goes into the record. At the next meeting, the first item is whether the previous decisions held. That is the loop. It does not need software to run, and it does need the numbers to be believed.
The meeting fails for a reason unrelated to its format. The three numbers come from three places that were never reconciled. Demand is from the sales lead's spreadsheet. Capacity is from the plant manager's head. Inventory is from the system, which the warehouse says is wrong. The first twenty minutes are spent arguing about whose number is right, and the decisions never begin.
This is the same disagreement we described in why the stock count disagrees in three systems, moved forward in time. If the starting inventory cannot be trusted, the projected inventory cannot either, and the plan is a guess with a date on it.
So the work before the meeting is reconciliation. Demand, capacity and inventory are drawn from named sources, refreshed on a set day, and reviewed by one person before the pre-read goes out. When something does not reconcile, the pre-read says so and names the owner, and the meeting is shorter, not longer.
The plan has a practical customer-facing use. When a customer asks for a date, the person quoting can look at the plan and see whether capacity and materials exist in that week. A date that the plan supports is a date the company can keep. A date quoted without it is the origin of the late deliveries that later show up as an on-time delivery problem, which we cover in the promise date nobody owns.
That link is why the plan is worth the effort even for a company that thinks it is too small. The number of quotes that depend on it each month is large, and each quote is a promise.
Imagine a manufacturer of thirty people that makes industrial enclosures. Orders and the forecast for next month add up to 1,200 units. The plant can make 1,000 with the current shifts. Finished stock and work in progress cover about 150, so the gap is fifty units.
At the meeting, the plant manager says that a Saturday shift, twice, would add about sixty units at a known cost. The sales lead says that two customers with eighty units between them would accept a week's delay. The controller notes that the overtime costs about as much as the margin on thirty units.
The decision is to move one customer's forty units back by a week, and to run one Saturday for the remaining ten. It goes in the record with an owner and a date, and the customer who is moved is called that day, before the late date has to be explained.
The company did not need a planning system for this. It needed the three numbers on one page, trusted, and thirty minutes.
Keep the room small: the sales lead, the plant manager, the purchasing lead and whoever owns the money, usually the controller or the owner. Four to six people is enough. A larger meeting turns into a status review, and the decisions slow down.
Treat absence as a decision too. If the plant manager cannot attend, the capacity number is not defended and the meeting moves, because a plan that production did not agree to is a forecast. The same goes for sales. The value of the meeting is that the people who make the promises and the people who keep them sit at one table with one page.
Begin with one product family and a three-month horizon. Choose the day the numbers refresh, usually the last working day of the month after the close. Hold the meeting in the first week. Keep the pre-read to a page, and keep the record of decisions to a list.
After three cycles, review which inputs caused the arguments. Those are the sources to fix, and they are usually the same few: an inventory count that is stale, a forecast with no history, and a capacity figure that nobody has written down.
Write the three numbers for next month on one page, with a source beside each, and ask whether the plant manager, the sales lead and the controller would each sign it. Whichever will not is where the first piece of work is. If all three would, you are ready for the meeting, and our work on where job cost and invoice drift apart is the next problem you will meet.
We start with a no-risk discovery: we build the one-page plan from your own systems for the next three months, show where the three numbers disagree and why, and you pay for the discovery only if you go on. A build comes with a guaranteed estimate, so if we estimate low, we absorb the difference. After go-live, Managed Technical Operations keeps the three feeds reconciled so the meeting can be about decisions.
A planning meeting works when the numbers were settled before it began.
In a no-risk discovery we follow an order from sale to shipment to invoice across your systems and show where it breaks and what one connected system would change. You pay only if you proceed. Or see how we approach it.
More on the same problem:
"Something isn't working." "We're outgrowing our tools." "We're afraid to make the wrong move." No-Risk Discovery is a short, practical conversation that gets you clarity before you commit to anything big. We'll tell you if we're a fit. If we're not, we'll tell you that too.
Say who you are and ask. A person replies within one business day.
