The SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP)

Operating a business company can both rewarding and frustrating. Managing sales and operations has so many tricks and loopholes. But like any challenges, when the right choice of actions are taken, the obstacles can be transformed into factors of business success.

Some of the challenges that companies encounter include downward margin pressure, constrained revenue growth and operating inefficiency.

When a business starts to grow, new products or services will continue to be introduced along with other products with are repacked or evolved. As this happens, things will start to get complicated.

In the past, companies have experienced many sales and operation processes which are not capable of reconciling the perspective of marketing, sales, manufacturing and logistics. When different parts of a company are operating separating with no regular communication, different decision can create confusion. For instance, some departments need aggregated data which are presented in a different dimension that are relevant only to them and not to another.

But with business tools such as the SAP xApp Sales and Operations Planning (SAP xSOP), these complications will never be a problem anymore. As the application promises – things will be "One Business, One Plan".

As a general overview, the SAP xSOP is a family of business solution application designed to make a company establish as single and unified plan in order to move efficiently in the day to day operations.

SAP xSOP primarily helps a company by consolidating business plans. With a consolidate plan, the company can make intensive review and monitoring of critical high level plans affecting all areas of sales and operations such as finance, marketing and customer relations. From this unified plans, effective strategies can be made to gain competitive edge over the competitors.

Data aggregation can be effectively performed by SAP xSOP. With data aggregate, the company can general reports to give the company a time picture of the overall operations. Access to timely and relevant data can be granted to specific roles for security and modularity in the decisions.

In conjunction with SAP NetWeaver, SAP xSOP make efficient planning integration to give company users easy to vital information from other software business solutions. Both SAP and non-SAP applications can work together to give a company a better and consolidate picture all of all data pertaining to planning and better manage the generation of financial plans, demand and supply.

In order to facilitate synchronized tasks among teams and their members, SAP xSOP also includes a Milestone and Process Management feature. With this feature, it would be possible to have multiple working processes in an organized manner with allowance for variations. Tasks can be defined clearly and monitored with ease despite a multitude of simultaneous processes.

SAP xSOP is built on a robust supply and demand planning functionality and extends the area of collaborative business planning to the next level. With this solutions implementation comes reduced total cost of ownership as this leverages on existing IT infrastructure and overall company performance.