Sales and operations planning: challenges and opportunities for industrial food producers

Paper in proceeding, 2013

This paper explores how the use of sales and operations planning (S&OP) may deal with the challenges set by the planning environment by investigating S&OP at four Scandinavian industrial food producers. Variables connected to the product and market, e.g. perishability, customer service elements and supply uncertainty were identified as particularly critical for the S&OP process. It was found that there is a great potential for S&OP in the food industry, foremost to cope with the imbalances between demand and supply and to create prerequisites for a stable production process.