Who Should Own the S&OP Process?

S&OP should be owned by the business, chaired by the executive who owns the P&L, and facilitated by a single named process owner. Those are three different jobs and collapsing them into one is the most common structural mistake. In most Australian mid-market businesses the facilitator sits in supply chain or planning, but the decision rights belong to the general manager or CEO. When supply chain both runs the process and owns its outcome, S&OP becomes a forecasting exercise with no authority over the functions it needs to influence.

What is the difference between owning, chairing and facilitating?

• The business owns the plan. The output is a commitment the whole executive team stands behind, not a supply chain document.

• The P&L executive chairs the meeting. They hold the decision rights and settle trade-offs between service, cost and working capital.

• The process owner facilitates. They run the calendar, chase the inputs, reconcile the numbers before the room, and hold people to actions afterwards.

Where should the process owner sit?

The process owner should sit outside both sales and operations, because their job requires them to challenge each. Planning, supply chain or a dedicated business planning function are the usual homes. What matters more than the reporting line is that the role is named, that one person holds it, and that the person has enough seniority to ask a sales director why a forecast moved 30% without explanation.

Should sales own the demand plan?

Sales owns the sales forecast, which is an input. The demand plan is different: it is the reconciled number the business commits to after the forum has weighed the sales view against history, statistical baseline, supply constraints and financial targets. Handing the demand plan to sales outright tends to produce optimistic numbers that inflate inventory. Taking sales out of it entirely produces a plan nobody in the field believes.

What decisions does the owner actually make?

The process owner makes very few decisions and forces many. Their job is to surface the gaps: where the demand plan exceeds capacity, where the financial plan and the operational plan have diverged, and which trade-offs need an executive answer this month. If a monthly cycle produces no decisions, either the gaps are not being surfaced or the chair is not exercising decision rights.

How much of a role is this?

For a business between roughly AU$20M and AU$200M in revenue, facilitating a monthly S&OP cycle is typically a part-time commitment absorbed into an existing planning role, not a new headcount. For context, a fully loaded demand planner in Australia costs AU$115,000 to AU$135,000 a year and a demand planning manager AU$140,000 to AU$180,000, while outsourced S&OP implementation runs at around AU$5,000 per month. The full cost comparison is here.

What if nobody senior will take it?

That is a useful signal rather than a staffing problem. If no executive will chair the forum and no manager will own the cycle, the business has not yet decided that cross-functional planning matters. Starting anyway produces a meeting that decays into a status update within two or three cycles. It is cheaper to resolve the sponsorship question first.

For where this sits relative to integrated business planning, see S&OP vs IBP. If you are considering handing the function out entirely, see supply chain as a service.

Frequently asked questions

Who should own the S&OP process?

The business owns it, the P&L executive chairs it, and a single named process owner facilitates it. Splitting facilitation from decision rights is what keeps it a decision forum rather than a reporting exercise.

Should sales own the demand plan?

Sales owns the sales forecast as an input. The demand plan is the reconciled, agreed number the business commits to, and it is owned by the forum rather than by sales alone.

Can supply chain own S&OP?

Supply chain can facilitate it well. Problems start when supply chain also owns the outcome, because the process then has no authority over the functions whose behaviour it needs to change.

Does a small business need a dedicated S&OP owner?

Not a dedicated full-time role. It needs a single named person accountable for running the cycle, which in a business under roughly AU$50M revenue is usually a part of an existing planning or operations role.