The 3 Questions Every S&OP Process Should Answer

Most sales and operations planning meetings spend the whole hour looking backward. That's a symptom, not the point of a real S&OP process. Izba founder and CEO Aaron Alpeter, who ran demand planning at Unilever before operating roles at Mirror, The Farmer's Dog, and Hubble Contacts, says it only has to answer three questions every month.

What is an S&OP process supposed to do?

An S&OP process, short for sales and operations planning, is the recurring monthly cycle a company uses to reconcile what it wants to happen, what it expects to happen, and what actually happened. Done well, it isn't a meeting format or a template. It's a discipline for comparing three numbers against each other and closing the gap between them.

What are the three questions S&OP should answer?

Aaron breaks it into three questions: what do we want to have happen, what do we think is going to happen, and what actually happened. If a company can answer all three every month and hold the tension between them, the rest of the process, meeting cadence, reporting format, who owns what, falls into place on its own.

The gap between "want" and "think" is where most companies get stuck. Leadership sets a hundred million dollar target. The team responsible for hitting it privately expects ninety. Instead of naming that gap early, plenty of companies spend the first three quarters of the year quietly behind plan, then cut the forecast in September once the shortfall becomes obvious, taking supply chain, inventory, and budget planning down with it.

Why does S&OP usually stall at "what happened"?

Reporting what happened last month is the easiest of the three questions to answer, and it's where a lot of that work stops. Aaron argues the real value of the process sits in the trade-off conversation: what would it take to close the gap between ninety million and a hundred million, and which of those levers the company is actually willing to pull.

He also pushes back on treating "forecast" as a fixed noun. In his view it should only be a verb. Two people in the same meeting often mean different things when they say "the forecast," one describing an ambition and the other a realistic expectation, without ever naming the difference out loud.

How does company culture change how S&OP should work?

Aaron has seen a handful of recurring planning cultures across the founder-led and enterprise brands he's worked with. A founder-led, command-and-control company (he points to Ralph Lauren, where the founder still signs off on every piece of merchandise) runs planning very differently than a franchise model like KFC, where local operators make most of the calls, or a large consensus-driven organization like Unilever or Procter & Gamble, where planning happens by getting the right people in a room until they agree.

The mistake isn't picking the wrong meeting cadence. It's importing a process built for one of these cultures into a company that runs on a different one, then being surprised when nobody uses it.

What's one habit that makes S&OP actually work?

Aaron points to consistency over precision. When he helped launch Hubble Contacts, the founding team's first 18-month forecast took five minutes to produce because there was no data yet to work from. They kept showing up with an updated number every month anyway. By the time the product launched and demand took off, the factory had already watched the team hit three forecasts in a row, and trusted the next one enough to build out manufacturing lines ahead of confirmed orders. Hubble oversold that forecast and never had a stockout, carrying 30 days of inventory the entire way.

The lesson: it doesn't have to be right every month to be useful. It has to be consistent enough that the rest of the company can plan around it.