Tom Wallace and I are currently collaborating on a portion of his new book. According to Tom, the book is titled Sales & Operations Planning: Beyond the Basics and according to Tom, "will focus on innovative enhancements to the basic S&OP set of processes". One such innovative enhancement that has been made by V&M STAR is the full integration of cash flow forecasting within the S&OP process.
At V&M STAR, Finance was involved with S&OP from day one and within six months, after the process was stable, we were able to begin integrating financial data. I believe that one of the best choices we made was involving Finance from the beginning so that they would be able to understand the S&OP process better, and begin to understand where the data would now come from.
Don't worry though if you didn't include Finance in your S&OP process in the beginning because it's not too late! The important thing is that your finance department becomes accustomed to how the S&OP process works and what role they will be expected to play going forward.
