At CYRIAS, Taciane Santerre, Purchasing Project Director, has extensive experience in managing direct purchasing projects and deploying tailor-made solutions for industrial companies. As an Ivalua platform specialist, she has supported numerous deployments for French and international organisations.
In this article, Taciane shares her experience on how digital tools can be used to improve data reliability and anticipate disruptions in the supply chain, particularly through an S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning) approach that brudges the gap between purchasing and operational planning.
S&OP: a lever for synchronizing sales, production and supply
S&OP is a cross-functional planning process that aims to align demand (sales) and production capacity (operations) around a single, shared plan. Its objective is twofold:
- Ensure product availability while minimising costs associated with stock or overcapacity.
- Facilitate decision-making with consolidated, reliable data that is accessible to all stakeholders, from sales to purchasing.
In the industrial sector, S&OP often suffers from data silos: sales data from a CRM system, isolated production schedules, Excel forecast files, and scattered exchanges between departments.
The result: decisions based on incomplete information, discrepancies between forecasts and reality, and increased risks of shortages or overstocking.
Reliable data: the foundation of effective S&OP
« Even the best S&OP tools can fail if the data is unreliable. », emphasizes Taciane Santerre, Project Director at Cyrias.
In a manufacturing context, every data error (available quantity, supplier lead time, machine capacity, or maintenance date) can distort overall planning. Data reliability therefore becomes a major challenge for:
- Sales, to secure promises made to customers and reduce delivery delays.
- Operations, to plan production according to actual capacities.
- Purchasing, to anticipate raw material requirements and avoid shortages.
Integrating Purchasing into the S&OP Process: A Lever for Resilience
Traditionally, Purchasing is consulted downstream of the S&OP process, once the production plan has been defined. CYRIAS and Ivalua’s approach focus on integrating Purchasing from the planning phase, upstream of the S&OP cycle. In concrete terms, this means:
- Early launch of capacity surveys: suppliers are asked about their production capacities based on forecast volumes, well before the industrial plan is approved.
- Structured data sharing: the information collected is integrated into the Ivalua platform and then returned to the S&OP planning teams.
- Two-way synchronisation: data updated on the supplier side (availability, lead times, constraints) feeds into internal planning in real time.
This continuous feedback loop enable bottlenecks anticipation and address before they disrupt production and to adjust sales and purchasing plans in a coordinated manner.
The role of digitalisation: from visibility to resilience
Thanks to the Ivalua platform, CYRIAS support manufacturers in building a collaborative ecosystem between internal departments (sales, operations, purchasing) and external partners (suppliers, subcontractors). The benefits are numerous:
- Increased visibility into the availability of critical materials and components.
- Reduced risk of disruption thanks to early warnings based on consolidated data.
- Proactive planning: dynamic reallocation of volumes or adjustment of production schedules.
- Complete traceability of exchanges in a centralised and secure supplier portal.
This approach has already been successfully deployed in several industrial contexts, particularly for groups operating in environments with high production constraints. The use of Ivalua’s standard modules has enabled data structuring and make the S&OP process more robust, strengthening collaboration between customers and suppliers.
Conclusion
In today’s environment where supply chain resilience has become a strategic priority, S&OP can no longer be standalone processes between sales and production. Integrating purchasing and suppliers at the heart of the process is a key performance factor: it transforms S&OP into a true global supply chain management tool.
With her experience in industrial projects and her expertise in Ivalua, Taciane Santerre perfectly illustrates this convergence between digitalisation, collaboration and data reliability.
If you’re facing avec challenges with your suppliers or would like to discuss these topic further, contact our teams!
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