S&OP is the scenario that integrates marketing, sales, product development, supply chain management, and manufacturing to create one set of integrated plans. The input to S&OP is the forecast provided by Sales & Marketing, where a sales manager sets sales or contribution targets for the sales employees in the field. Since the sales manager and the sales employees use a common planning platform, the planning tasks performed by the sales manager are closely reconciled with the business planning and operational planning tasks performed by the sales employees. You can specify as many dimensions for entering planning figures (such as sales region, product group) as you need for your planning requirements. The different planners can access the same data but plan at different levels.and the output is the overall level of output planned for production. The S&OP process can be tightly integrated with the respective supply chain partners, using web-enabled collaboration tools such SAP Demand & Supply Planning for IM&C and xS&OP.

xSOP provides an out-of-the-box solution for Sales & Operations Planning including

• Pre-delivered KPIs and analytics
• Ability to leverage plans generated in ERP, SCM or BI
• Process tracking tools to manage the S&OP process
• Document Management
• Rapid implementation
• Lower TCO (based on Netweaver)

The Global Available-to-Promise (ATP) component uses a rules-based strategy to ensure you can deliver what you promise to your customers. Global ATP performs multilevel component and capacity checks in real time and in simulation mode to ensure that you can match supply and demand. You can also perform these ATP checks against aggregated, memory-resident data for even better performance. Global ATP maintains simultaneous, immediate access to product availability along the supply chain, so you can be confident that you can meet your delivery commitments.

Global ATP draws on a number of criteria to arrive at a commitment, including:

• Product substitution: If a finished product or component is not available, the system automatically selects a substitute using rules-based selection criteria.
• Selection of alternative locations: As with product substitution, Global ATP can source materials from alternative locations. You can also integrate this logic with the product substitution rules.
• Allocation : You can allocate products or components that are in short supply to customers, markets, orders, and so on. The ATP calculation and response take these allocations into consideration.