Sales, Operations, & Business Planning

Elevate existing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and transform planning processes with Integrated Business Planning (IBP) to drive strategic alignment across finance, supply chain, sales, and marketing teams. Catalant has the hands-on experience of former enterprise operators armed with battle-tested playbooks, enabling you to to:

Drive profitability by optimizing inventory and cash flow

Streamline operations and eliminate siloed decision making

Deliver consistently on financial plans and business commitments

APPROACH

Building your Sales, Operations, & Business Planning Blueprint

01

Benchmark processes

Assess your organization’s current state, comparing against the industry best practices of leading companies with mature S&OP/IBP capabilities, identifying gaps in existing methodology, processes, tools, and metrics.

02

Assess capabilities

Perform a human-centered assessment of skills, ways of working, cross-functional collaboration, and org design to identify where capability augmentation and change is needed most. This provides clarity on the behavioral changes needed to sustain S&OP/IBP excellence.

03

Create improvement roadmap

Develop a clear path that targets quick wins and high-ROI opportunities. Linked to your strategic goals and reinforced by structured change management, it moves you from foundational S&OP to end-to-end IBP.

04

Design the right cadence

Establish an optimal meeting and decision-making schedule for your organization, ensuring the right information flows to the right people at the right time.

05

Build sustainable capabilities

Partner on adopting internal capabilities through hands-on training, coaching, and knowledge transfer. Our expertise in change management helps your team develop the technical and leadership skills required to drive ongoing S&OP/IBP maturity independently.

WINNING TOGETHER

Sales, Operations, & Business Planning in Action

Mid-market Private Food Manufacturer
More Success Stories

Problem

Following a period of hyper-growth, a mid-market food manufacturer repeatedly failed to meet its yearly goals. Obsolete inventory piled up, finished goods stood at twice the sector benchmark, and profitability declined year after year.

Action

In six weeks, the Catalant team audited management routines, planning skills, metrics, and org design — building a solid case for IBP. The team then delivered a 18-month implementation plan, covering all five IBP stages and featuring templates, capability-building sessions and hands-on training.

Results

The IBP implementation transformed the organization’s performance across multiple dimensions:

 

  • 75% reduction in obsolete inventory and 50% reduction in finished goods inventory
  • 200 basis point increase in margins, reversing a multi-year decline
  • 90% reduction in leadership meetings, dramatically improving operational efficiency

S&OP Transformation for Specialty Retailer

A leading specialty retailer faced challenges caused by shifting development timelines, volatile macro environments, and tightening sector-wide capacity. Management turned to Catalant to re-engineer it’s S&OP process. The project tightened links between merchandise and supply planners, restored the supply-demand equilibrium, and set up self-sustaining improvement cycles.

S&OP Redesign and Implementation

An industry-leading steel manufacturer with lacked an integrated S&OP, leaving teams siloed, and the warehouses with excess inventory. By standing up a central S&OP hub that fused demand forecasting with production planning, the company cut inventory by 25% and improved forecasting accuracy by 17 percentage points.

FEATURED EXPERTS

Featured Sales, Operations, & Business Planning Experts

Paul M.

20-year supply chain expert with a focus on CPG and industrials

Seasoned supply chain executive specializing in strategy, transformation, integrated business planning, logistics optimization, advanced systems implementation, capital planning, performance metrics, and customer service excellence.

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Dena M.

Hands-on S&OP and IBP expert delivering practical, actionable results

Supply chain consultant with experience at global manufacturing and consumer brands. Transforms complex planning challenges into measurable business value by implementing best-in-class S&OP, IBP, and inventory optimization with a pragmatic approach.

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Mitch M.

Ph.D. and expert in planning, lean supply chain and inventory optimization

Helping small and mid-size companies transform their S&OP for 26 years with a streamlined ‘Lite’ approach that solves problems.

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Jay J.

Ex-McKinsey expert leading S&OP and supply chain transformations

20+ years driving EBITDA-focused S&OP/IBP improvements across Fortune 500 and PE portfolio companies. Delivers measurable margin, service, and working capital gains through strategic planning, network optimization, and effective tool implementation.

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