The sales and planning process is a crucial tool for synchronization in supply chain management. In most of the companies, the monthly Supply and Operation Planning meeting brings all the operational control significant departments to determine the best way of managing the company resources. There are many sales and operations planning that require getting integrated.
Integration of demand planning is one of the crucial ways of integrating sales and operation planning. Combining demand planning helps in ensuring the product meets the demands hence avoiding stock-outs as well as excess inventory. Planning within demand management keeps the company focus on providing a moving forward view of supporting and demand portfolio. For demand management, there must be a sales plan which includes supporting marketing and sales activities. A portfolio plan provides a time-phased of planned deletions as well as new products (Ivert et al., 2015).
The other category of sales and operation plan that needs to be integrated is the priority plan. Planning within the set priorities helps the business institution to focus on the balancing demand and supply as well as buffering uncertainties as well as prioritizing resources. The production plan which is under the priority plan is a time-phased projection of production which is supposed to meet the demand of the consumers as well as the sale plan. The production plan is constrained since it got based on decision making on priorities of constraint resource or scarce resources. Inventory plan is a time-phased inventory which is based production and sales plan (Ivert et al., 2015).
I have integrated two processes that are demand and priority management. The two categories are related, and they focus on meeting the customer demand. For any organization, consumers are always the priority hence these two processes, focus on sales and supply. By having a demand management and priority will help the company from the last minute shuffling in the distribution as well as production process.