Teaching S&OP with Supply Chain Analytics

The lack of dynamic supply chain analytics tools make teaching quantitative aspects of Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) difficult. Lectures remain often limited to the explanation of concepts of integration, coordination and of planning stages to students. It is hard to reveal all supply chain complexities in the S\&OP process, such as components procurement and transportation, production and inventory planning, and delivering finished products to customers to meet the sales plan. In this paper, we propose a supply chain analytics approach for teaching S&OP. By combining transactional supply chain planning techniques on spreadsheets, evolving to decision analytics on mathematical modeling, and to a multi-user S&OP web tool, we provide a dynamic and responsive environment for effectively teaching S&OP. On excercices, students can model demand forecast, and include different sales plan to analyse supply chain plans. Additionally, two surveys can be used to capture (i) students learning experience and (ii) their evaluation on the web tool usability during class.