Managing evolutionary paths in Sales and Operations Planning: key dimensions and sequences of implementation
研究了销售与运营规划（S&OP）成熟度模型中各维度在阶段过渡期间的演化与互动，发现不同成熟度阶段下维度行动的串行或并行程度不同，并强调人员与组织维度的重要性随成熟度提升而增加。
Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a key process that improves integration and communication between business functions and aligns the plans of a company into one integrated set of plans. This article focuses on the so-called S&OP ‘maturity models’, which describe the successive stages in the advancement of S&OP process according to a precise set of dimensions. These models are specifically thought to plan the transitions towards advanced stages, rather than to provide guidance on how to execute them. This paper aims to address this research gap by investigating how the dimensions evolve and interact during the execution of the transition between two subsequent stages. Three case studies of S&OP transitions with different starting and destination maturity stages have been compared. The findings demonstrate that the degree of seriality vs. parallelism among actions on different S&OP dimensions during the transition depends on the evolution stage of S&OP process. The study sheds light on the dynamics among the dimensions during the different transitions and warns managers not to underestimate the criticality of the people and organisation dimension, whose importance grows as the maturity level increases.