In this project, the company operated in a commodity-driven market where total supply volumes were essentially fixed. Unlike many other industries, production could not simply be scaled up or down under normal circumstances. As a result, supply became the starting point of the S&OP process, rather than the more common approach of building the plan from forecasted market demand.
By integrating both demand and supply into a dedicated S&OP planning environment, the organization was able to align demand with available supply at an aggregate level. This aligned demand was then decomposed into mid‑level product and customer hierarchies, where further refinement took place until a realistic and executable demand plan emerged. Once finalized, the mid‑level demand plan was transferred to the operational planning systems: APO Demand Planning (DP) for demand forecasting and ECC Production Planning (PP) for supply planning.