How can Sales and Operations Planning help Pharmaceutical industry?

How can Sales and Operations Planning help Pharmaceutical industry?

In today’s horrendous competitive market, you will have to go beyond to just setting revenue, cost and margin targets, if you want to excel. Before setting any sales and revenue related targets you need to do in-depth homework like uniting the entire supply chain around achieving them.

E.g. let’s take the example of any Pharmaceutical organization. Suppose XYZ Company want to launch a new drug in the market. This starts with sampling and gathering stakeholders feedback, tracking competitors activity, then include branding, marketing and sales planning aligning with production, resource, inventory and distribution planning. That means Sales & Operations Planning include sales, marketing and entire supply chain.

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Definition:

A process to develop tactical plans that provide management the ability to strategically direct its businesses to achieve competitive advantage on a continuous basis by integrating customer-focused marketing plans for new and existing products with the management of the supply chain. The process brings together all the plans for the business (sales, marketing, and development, manufacturing, sourcing, and financial) into one integrated set of plans.

Why is Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) very important?

Integrated or S&OP is the back bone to do tactical planning for getting competitive advantage incessantly. Now a days regulatory controls have tightened, new markets have emerged, competitive playing field have changed due to mergers and acquisitions, startups and generic producers broadening their scope.

Due to this trend the whole supply chain have been transformed into complex global value networks as multinationals have increasingly focused on what they are good at and outsourced everything else to specialist companies with technical expertise in a particular area. The typical supply chain now involves many of these kinds of specialist firms. However, cost reductions in the supply chain should not be at the expense of regulatory control and compliance. So multinationals need to find ways to design and manage these large and complex networks to maximize their competitive advantage.

Successful sales and operations planning (S&OP) process enables you to align multiple teams around a common plan and set of metrics, creating a more effective balance between supply and demand.