Monthly S&OP for a 60-Person Factory: The 45-Minute Version

Walk into a lot of 60-person factories and you will find the sales team and the production scheduler working off different assumptions about what this month looks like. Not because anyone is being difficult. Just because they haven’t sat in the same room together for three weeks.

S&OP, Sales and Operations Planning, fixes that. Not with a software platform or a change programme. With a monthly meeting and a bit of preparation.

What S&OP actually is at this scale

At large manufacturers, S&OP is a multi-week cycle involving finance, marketing, supply chain, and a spreadsheet pack that takes longer to read than to act on. That is not what this is.

For a factory your size, S&OP is a structured conversation between the people who take orders and the people who fulfil them. Once a month. Fixed time. Fixed format. Forty-five minutes.

The goal is simple: make sure everyone has the same view of what demand looks like for the next 12 weeks and whether production can meet it. If there is a mismatch, you decide what to do about it before it becomes a problem.

Who needs to be in the room

The meeting only stays to time if the right people are there and the wrong ones are not.

You need the person who owns order intake (sales director, commercial manager, or the MD if they do their own selling), the person who owns the production schedule, and the person who owns purchasing or materials. That is three people. Finance can join if they add something. Everyone else stays out.

A meeting with eight people and a vague agenda will take three hours and produce nothing. A meeting with three people and a one-page pre-read will take 45 minutes and produce a decision.

Preparing before you walk in

The meeting is not where the analysis happens. If you turn up without numbers, you will spend most of the time reconstructing what happened last month instead of deciding what to do next month.

Whoever owns the production schedule should prepare a one-page summary beforehand:

• Actual output against plan for the previous month
• Forward order book for the next 12 weeks, with any peaks or gaps flagged
• Current stock position on key raw materials or bought-in parts
• Known constraints: planned downtime, holidays, supplier issues

One page. If it runs to three pages, it has not been edited enough.

The 45-minute format

0 to 10 minutes: last month. What did you plan to ship? What did you actually ship? If there is a gap, note the reason and move on. This is not the time to relitigate it.

10 to 30 minutes: the next 12 weeks. Walk through the forward order position. Where are the peaks? Are there gaps that need filling? Can production meet the demand profile as it stands? If not, what changes: delivery dates, overtime, subcontracting, or a conversation with a customer?

30 to 40 minutes: actions and decisions. Write down what was agreed and who owns each item. Three to five actions is typical. More than eight means the meeting has turned into a workshop and you have lost the thread.

40 to 45 minutes: next meeting. Confirm the date. Same people, same format, same time slot.

What tends to go wrong

The meeting slides. Someone is on holiday or has a customer visit, so it gets pushed back. Then pushed again. Three months later nobody is quite sure what the order book looks like and a delivery crisis is two weeks away.

The fix is treating the date as fixed. Set the whole year’s schedule in one afternoon and put it in everyone’s diary now. If someone cannot attend, they send their numbers in advance and the meeting goes ahead without them.

The second common failure is confusing S&OP with problem-solving. If a specific account or a machine issue needs a proper discussion, book a separate slot for it. The monthly meeting is for the whole-factory view, not one fire.

The third is over-preparing. A 12-tab spreadsheet pack signals anxiety, not organisation. Keep the pre-read to one page and the meeting will look after itself.

Getting started

If you are not running S&OP at all yet, the biggest obstacle is usually not the meeting format. It is not knowing where the real planning gaps are. The losses diagnostic at losses.cadencestandard.com gives you a structured way to identify where time and margin are leaking before you try to fix anything, and most factories find the S&OP-related gaps show up plainly in the results.

Once the monthly meeting is running steadily, it tends to pull other routines into shape around it. The Cadence Six framework sets out the six operating rhythms that hold a lean factory together without a dedicated improvement team, and the monthly S&OP review is one of them.