If your CPG brand is approaching or has already passed $10 million in revenue, you have probably felt this tension already.

The business has grown too complex to plan informally, but it is not yet large enough to support a full bench of planners, supply chain managers, finance analysts, and enterprise-grade planning software.

Sales has one view of demand. Operations has another. Finance is trying to figure out how much cash the inventory plan will actually require. Promotions shift the forecast. Retail expansion adds uncertainty. Suppliers want commitments before anyone in the room feels confident in the number.

This is exactly where a Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process earns its keep.

A $10M CPG brand does not need the same S&OP process as a billion-dollar manufacturer. What it needs is a right-sized process: one that produces a single demand plan, flags supply and inventory constraints early, shows the financial impact of each option, and gives leadership a structured place to make decisions instead of reacting to them.

This guide walks through how to build that kind of S&OP process for a growth-stage CPG brand, step by step, without turning the business into a bureaucracy.

At W.NDeen Advisory, we design and lead S&OP processes for CPG brands at exactly this stage: growing fast enough to need real planning discipline, but not ready to build (or pay for) a full enterprise planning organization.

Table of Contents

1. What Is an S&OP Process for CPG Brands?

2. Does a $10M CPG Brand Really Need S&OP?

3. What S&OP Should Actually Accomplish

4. The Right-Sized S&OP Process for a $10M CPG Brand

5. Step 1: Prepare the Data and Review Performance

6. Step 2: Run the Demand Review

7. Step 3: Run the Supply and Inventory Review

8. Step 4: Reconcile Gaps Before Executive S&OP

9. Step 5: Run the Executive S&OP Meeting

10. S&OP Roles and Responsibilities

11. S&OP KPIs for CPG Brands

12. A Practical Monthly S&OP Calendar

13. What the Executive S&OP Meeting Should Decide

14. Common S&OP Mistakes

15. Do You Need S&OP Software?

16. A 90-Day S&OP Implementation Roadmap

17. Frequently Asked Questions

18. Next Steps: Build an S&OP Process That Drives Decisions

What Is an S&OP Process for CPG Brands?

An S&OP process for CPG brands is a recurring cross-functional planning process that aligns demand, supply, inventory, and financial expectations into one operating plan approved by leadership.

At its simplest, S&OP is built to answer four questions:

• What do we expect to sell?
• Can our supply chain support that demand?
• What will the plan require in inventory, capacity, and cash?
• What decisions does leadership need to make when demand and supply do not align?

The output should not be another forecast.

It should be an approved operating plan.

The forecast informs S&OP. It is not S&OP.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Forecasting estimates demand. A structured demand planning process builds a cross-functional view of that demand. S&OP then reconciles that demand with supply, inventory, financial constraints, and executive priorities.

This is why demand planning and forecasting should not be treated as interchangeable with S&OP. They are connected parts of the same operating system, but they perform different jobs.

If you want the formal industry definition, ASCM (the Association for Supply Chain Management) maintains a solid overview of the traditional S&OP framework. Just know that most growth-stage CPG brands need a much leaner version of it than a Fortune 500 manufacturer runs, which is exactly what the rest of this guide walks through.

Does a $10M CPG Brand Really Need S&OP?

Not every $10M CPG brand needs a complex S&OP organization.

But most need the discipline behind S&OP, even if the word itself never comes up in a leadership meeting.

The need usually becomes obvious when growth starts creating coordination problems such as:

• Sales and operations working from different forecasts
• Retail expansion creating inventory surprises
• Promotions repeatedly causing stockouts or excess inventory
• Purchase orders being released reactively
• Supplier lead times changing without a coordinated response
• Finance struggling to predict inventory cash requirements
• High-velocity SKUs stocking out while slower products accumulate
• Leadership meetings dominated by operational fire drills
• No clear owner of the final demand and supply plan

At this stage, the business does not need more meetings.

It needs a better decision process.

A right-sized S&OP process gives a growth-stage CPG brand one recurring forum where commercial ambition, operational capability, and financial reality get reconciled before cash is committed, not after.

What S&OP Should Actually Accomplish

A successful S&OP process should create alignment and decisions, not simply review reports.

By the end of each monthly cycle, leadership should have clarity on:

• The approved demand plan
• Material changes from the prior forecast
• Major upside and downside demand risks
• Inventory exposure by priority SKU
• Supplier and production constraints
• Service-level risks
• Working-capital requirements
• Key scenarios that require executive decisions
• Who owns each resulting action

The objective is not consensus for the sake of consensus. It is to produce one number the business can actually plan against.

Sometimes that means sales does not get all the inventory it wants. Sometimes it means finance approves additional working capital. Sometimes it means operations accepts expedite cost to protect an important retailer. Sometimes it means leadership deliberately accepts stockout risk instead of overbuilding inventory.

Those trade-offs are what S&OP is designed to surface.

The Right-Sized S&OP Process for a $10M CPG Brand

Traditional S&OP models commonly use five stages:

1. Data gathering and performance review
2. Demand review
3. Supply review
4. Pre-S&OP reconciliation
5. Executive S&OP

A $10M CPG brand should preserve that logic without recreating the meeting structure of a Fortune 500 company.

One person may hold multiple roles. Some reviews can happen asynchronously. The demand and supply teams may be only a handful of people. That is fine.

What matters is that each stage produces the information required for the next decision.

S&OP Stage	Primary Question	Typical Owner	Required Output
Data & Performance	What happened, and what changed?	Demand Planning / Operations	Clean KPI and exception pack
Demand Review	What do we realistically expect to sell?	Sales + Demand Planning	Consensus demand plan
Supply & Inventory Review	Can we support the demand plan?	Operations / Supply Chain	Supply plan, inventory risks, constraints
Pre-S&OP	Where are the unresolved gaps?	S&OP Process Owner + Finance	Scenarios and recommendations
Executive S&OP	What will the business commit to?	Founder / CEO / Executive Team	Approved plan, decisions, owners

This creates a complete S&OP process without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Step 1: Prepare the Data and Review Performance

The S&OP cycle should begin with facts.

Before debating the future, the team needs to understand what happened against the previous plan.

Prepare:

• Actual sales by SKU and channel
• Forecast versus actual performance
• Forecast bias
• Inventory on hand
• Days or weeks of supply
• Stockouts
• Open purchase orders
• Supplier lead-time changes
• Fill rate or OTIF performance
• Excess and slow-moving inventory
• Major promotional results

The purpose is not to create a massive reporting pack.

The purpose is to identify exceptions.

What materially changed? Which forecast assumptions were wrong? Which SKUs or customers require attention? Where did the prior operating plan fail?

This gives the remaining S&OP process a factual starting point.

Step 2: Run the Demand Review

The demand review answers: What does the business realistically expect customers to buy?

Start with a statistical or historical baseline rather than asking sales to build the forecast from scratch.

Then incorporate documented commercial inputs such as:

• New retailer launches
• New distribution doors
• Promotions and trade activity
• Pricing changes
• Marketing campaigns
• Product launches
• Product discontinuations
• Known customer wins or losses
• Seasonality
• Channel-specific demand changes

The goal is not to produce the most optimistic sales plan. It is to produce the most defensible demand plan.

Any major override should answer three questions:

1. What changed?
2. Why should it change demand?
3. How much demand should it add or remove?

Document those assumptions. Then measure them later. Over time, that creates accountability and improves the quality of commercial inputs.

Step 3: Run the Supply and Inventory Review

Once the demand plan is established, operations needs to determine whether the business can support it.

The supply and inventory review should evaluate:

• Finished-goods inventory
• Raw material and packaging availability
• Supplier lead times
• Co-manufacturer or production capacity
• Minimum order quantities
• Open purchase orders
• Production schedules
• Safety stock requirements
• Warehouse or 3PL constraints
• Expected stockout dates
• Excess inventory exposure

This is where the team asks: What would prevent us from delivering the demand plan?

The answer should be translated into specific risks and options. For example:

• A top SKU will stock out unless production moves forward two weeks
• A supplier cannot support the promotional upside without an earlier commitment
• A retailer launch will require inventory currently allocated elsewhere
• Supporting the full upside forecast will require significantly more working capital
• A slow-moving SKU needs to be reduced before another purchase order is released

The supply review should also connect to inventory optimization. The question is not simply whether enough inventory exists. It is whether the business has the right inventory positioned against the most important demand.

In practice, this is where we spend most of our time with clients: not building fancier forecasts, but making sure inventory is actually positioned against the SKUs and retailers that matter most.

Step 4: Reconcile Gaps Before Executive S&OP

The executive S&OP meeting should not be where the team discovers that demand exceeds supply. That work should happen beforehand.

The pre-S&OP stage reconciles the demand plan, supply plan, inventory position, and financial implications.

Unresolved issues should be converted into decision-ready scenarios. For example:

Scenario	Revenue	Margin / Cost	Inventory / Cash	Risk
Protect Full Demand	Highest revenue opportunity	May require expedite or overtime	Higher working-capital requirement	Demand may underperform
Protect Base Plan	Supports committed forecast	Maintains planned economics	Moderate inventory exposure	May miss upside
Constrain Supply	Lower revenue potential	Avoids incremental cost	Protects cash	Customer or stockout exposure

This changes the executive conversation. Instead of asking:

“What should we do?”

Leadership receives:

“Here are the three viable options, their financial and operational implications, and our recommendation.”

That is what makes S&OP an executive decision process.

Step 5: Run the Executive S&OP Meeting

The executive S&OP meeting is the culmination of the monthly planning cycle.

It should focus on exceptions, scenarios, and decisions. It should not be a two-hour spreadsheet review.

Suggested Executive S&OP Agenda

Agenda	Focus
Performance Review	What materially missed the prior plan and why?
Demand Summary	What changed in the forward demand plan?
Supply & Inventory Summary	Where are capacity, stock, supplier, or service risks?
Financial Impact	What does the plan mean for revenue, margin, and working capital?
Scenarios & Decisions	Which unresolved trade-offs require executive approval?
Plan Approval	What plan will the organization now operate against?
Actions	Who owns each decision, and by when?

A 60- to 90-minute executive meeting is usually enough if the preparation has been completed properly.

The meeting should end with:

• One approved operating plan
• Documented decisions
• Named owners
• Due dates
• Clear changes from the prior plan

If leadership leaves without those outputs, the meeting was probably a review, not S&OP.

S&OP Roles and Responsibilities

A $10M CPG brand does not need a dedicated employee for every S&OP role. One person may cover multiple responsibilities. What matters is that the responsibilities are explicit.

Role	Primary Responsibility
S&OP Process Owner	Owns the calendar, inputs, agenda, decision log, and process discipline
Sales	Provides retailer, customer, promotional, and commercial assumptions
Marketing	Provides campaigns, launches, pricing, and promotional inputs
Demand Planning	Builds the baseline forecast and reconciles commercial assumptions
Supply Chain / Operations	Validates capacity, inventory, suppliers, purchasing, and execution feasibility
Finance	Translates the plan into revenue, margin, inventory, and cash implications
CEO / Founder / Executive Sponsor	Resolves cross-functional trade-offs and approves the final plan

At a $10M brand, the founder may be the executive sponsor, the operations leader may also own supply planning, and finance may be fractional. That does not prevent S&OP from working. Ambiguous ownership does.

S&OP KPIs for CPG Brands

S&OP should focus on a small set of metrics that help leadership understand whether the plan is working.

Useful CPG S&OP KPIs include:

Demand Metrics

• Forecast accuracy
• Forecast bias
• Forecast versus actual by priority SKU and channel
• Promotional forecast performance

Inventory Metrics

• Days or weeks of supply
• Inventory turns
• Stockout rate
• Excess and obsolete inventory
• Inventory value

Service Metrics

• Fill rate
• OTIF performance
• Backorders

Supply Metrics

• Supplier lead-time variance
• Production attainment
• Capacity constraints

Financial Metrics

• Revenue versus plan
• Margin impact
• Working capital tied up in inventory
• Expedite or premium freight expense

Do not turn the S&OP meeting into a KPI museum. Use metrics to identify the exceptions that require decisions.

A Practical Monthly S&OP Calendar

For most growth-stage CPG brands, S&OP should operate on a monthly cycle.

Timing	Activity	Output
Week 1	Close prior month, update KPIs, forecast vs. actual analysis	Performance and exception pack
Week 1-2	Demand Review	Updated consensus demand plan
Week 2	Supply & Inventory Review	Constraints, inventory risks, supply response
Week 3	Pre-S&OP Reconciliation	Scenarios, recommendations, financial implications
Week 4	Executive S&OP	Approved plan and decisions

A weekly operating review can sit underneath this monthly process. The weekly meeting should manage near-term exceptions such as stockout risk, purchase orders, delayed production, or allocation issues. The monthly S&OP process should make medium-term cross-functional decisions. Do not turn S&OP itself into a weekly firefighting meeting.

For the near-term operating cadence, see our guide on how often inventory should be reviewed.

What the Executive S&OP Meeting Should Decide

The easiest way to determine whether S&OP is working is to look at the decisions being made.

A strong executive S&OP process may decide:

• Whether to increase production to support retailer upside
• Whether to accept incremental working-capital exposure
• How constrained inventory should be allocated
• Whether a promotion should be supported, delayed, or modified
• Whether premium freight or overtime is justified
• Whether a supplier commitment should be increased
• Whether safety stock should change
• Whether a slow-moving SKU should be reduced or discontinued
• Whether a retailer launch should proceed at the current timing
• Which scenario best balances revenue, margin, service, and cash

This is the value of S&OP. It moves operational trade-offs out of disconnected Slack messages, spreadsheets, and emergency conversations and puts them into a repeatable decision structure.

Common S&OP Mistakes

We see these same patterns repeat across almost every CPG brand we work with at this stage:

Turning S&OP Into a Status Meeting

If each function simply reports what happened, the meeting is not doing its job. S&OP should focus on changes, exceptions, scenarios, and decisions.

Debating the Data in the Executive Meeting

The executive meeting is too late to discover that sales and operations disagree about the baseline numbers. Resolve data and functional disagreements during the earlier reviews.

Reviewing Every SKU

S&OP is not a line-by-line inventory meeting. Use segmentation and exception thresholds to focus attention on what materially affects revenue, service, margin, or cash.

Leaving Finance Out Until the End

A demand plan that cannot be financed is not an executable plan. Finance should help translate scenarios into revenue, margin, inventory, and working-capital implications.

Allowing Commercial Overrides Without Accountability

Sales and marketing input is essential. But overrides should have documented assumptions and eventually be compared with actual results.

Having No Executive Sponsor

Cross-functional conflicts eventually require authority. If nobody can make the final decision, the process becomes another debate.

Trying to Perfect the Process Before Launching It

S&OP maturity develops over multiple cycles. Start with a simple repeatable process, measure where it breaks, and improve it.

Do You Need S&OP Software?

Not necessarily.

A $10M CPG brand can run an effective S&OP process using structured spreadsheets, shared dashboards, an ERP or accounting system, and disciplined meeting workflows.

The technology should support the process. It should not define it.

We are often brought in after a brand has already bought planning software and is still firefighting. The software was rarely the problem. The process underneath it was.

Before buying S&OP or demand planning software, the business should be able to answer:

• Who owns the demand plan?
• What is the monthly planning calendar?
• How are demand and supply reconciled?
• Which KPIs matter?
• What decisions belong in executive S&OP?
• Who approves the final plan?

If those answers are unclear, software is unlikely to solve the underlying problem. Build the process first. Automate it when automation creates leverage.

A 90-Day S&OP Implementation Roadmap

You do not need a year-long transformation project to launch a useful S&OP process. For many growth-stage CPG brands, the first working version can be built over roughly three monthly cycles.

Days 1-30: Design the Process

• Audit the current planning cadence
• Identify existing data sources
• Define the S&OP process owner
• Establish demand, supply, inventory, and financial inputs
• Select the core KPIs
• Define roles and responsibilities
• Create the monthly calendar
• Build meeting templates and decision logs

The objective is not perfection. It is a process that everyone understands.

Days 31-60: Run the First Full Cycle

• Complete the demand review
• Complete the supply and inventory review
• Identify the first demand-supply gaps
• Build scenarios
• Run the first executive S&OP meeting
• Document decisions and owners

Expect friction. The first cycle will expose missing data, unclear ownership, and conflicting assumptions. That is useful.

Days 61-90: Stabilize the Rhythm

• Fix recurring data issues
• Refine exception thresholds
• Reduce unnecessary meeting content
• Strengthen forecast accountability
• Improve finance integration
• Track whether decisions were executed
• Run the second and third cycles consistently

By this stage, the goal is for S&OP to begin feeling like the way the business operates rather than a new initiative.

This is also where experienced S&OP Development support can accelerate implementation. W.NDeen Advisory helps brands design the process, lead the early cycles, define ownership, and build the internal discipline required for the team to eventually carry it forward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an S&OP process?

Sales and Operations Planning is a recurring cross-functional process that aligns demand, supply, inventory, and financial plans so leadership can approve one executable operating plan.

Does a $10M CPG brand need S&OP?

A $10M CPG brand may not need enterprise-level S&OP infrastructure, but it often needs the underlying discipline once SKU growth, retail expansion, promotions, suppliers, and inventory commitments make informal coordination unreliable.

How often should S&OP meetings happen?

The formal S&OP process should generally run monthly. Weekly operating or exception reviews can manage immediate inventory and execution issues underneath the monthly plan.

What are the five steps in an S&OP process?

A common S&OP process includes data gathering and performance review, demand review, supply review, pre-S&OP reconciliation, and executive S&OP. Smaller CPG brands can combine some of these activities while preserving the same decision flow.

Who should own S&OP?

One person should own the S&OP process and calendar, but the plan itself is cross-functional. Sales, marketing, operations, supply chain, finance, and executive leadership each contribute inputs and decisions.

What is the difference between demand planning and S&OP?

Demand planning develops the most realistic view of expected customer demand. S&OP takes that demand plan and reconciles it with supply, inventory, financial constraints, and executive priorities to produce an approved operating plan.

What is the difference between S&OP and a weekly operations meeting?

A weekly operations meeting focuses on near-term execution and exceptions. S&OP is a broader monthly decision process that looks forward and aligns demand, supply, inventory, finance, and leadership around the medium-term plan.

Do you need ERP or S&OP software to run S&OP?

No. A growth-stage CPG brand can run S&OP with spreadsheets and dashboards if the data, ownership, cadence, and decision process are disciplined. Technology becomes more valuable once the process itself is stable.

What should an executive S&OP meeting decide?

Executive S&OP should resolve material demand-supply gaps and approve decisions involving inventory, capacity, retailer commitments, promotions, working capital, service levels, and other cross-functional trade-offs.

How far forward should a CPG S&OP plan look?

The planning horizon should extend far enough to influence the longest meaningful commercial and supply decisions. For many growth-stage CPG brands, a rolling 12-18 month view is practical, with greater detail in the near term and more aggregate assumptions further out.

Next Steps: Build an S&OP Process That Drives Decisions

A $10M CPG brand does not need Fortune 500 bureaucracy. It does need alignment.

The purpose of S&OP is to create a repeatable operating rhythm where sales, operations, supply chain, finance, and leadership work from the same assumptions and make decisions before problems become crises.

A strong S&OP process should tell the business:

• What it expects to sell
• Whether supply can support it
• Where inventory risk exists
• How much cash the plan requires
• Which trade-offs leadership needs to resolve
• What plan the organization will execute

The process does not need to be complicated. It needs to be consistent, decision-driven, and owned.

At W.NDeen Advisory, we build and lead S&OP processes for growth-stage CPG brands that need stronger planning discipline without adding unnecessary complexity. We help establish the cadence, build the demand and supply reviews, integrate finance, define decision rights, and lead the early planning cycles until the process becomes part of how your team operates.

If sales, operations, and finance are still planning from different numbers, the next step is not another meeting. It is building an S&OP process that gives the business one plan it can actually execute.

Connect with W.NDeen Advisory to build an S&OP process designed for your current stage of growth.