Why do strong S&OP plans stall in execution?

An effective S&OP plan can be challenging to build. Sales, operations, and finance teams have to align on a demand forecast, a supply plan, the risks and opportunities to plan for, a budget; and then carry that plan into the next cycle with confidence.

But by the time the plan reaches the floor, conditions shift, and alignment starts to slip. The forecast that felt solid in the planning room runs into the shifting priorities of different teams. When supply, demand, and budget assumptions evolve alongside market conditions, the plan that took weeks of cross-functional coordination to create doesn’t match the current reality when it’s time to go live.

For many supply chain teams, keeping the plan aligned to what's actually happening on the floor is the toughest part of the process. A Gartner survey found that 42% of supply chain organizations struggle to lift the focus of S&OP planning beyond short-term objectives. If teams are forced into daily firefighting, there’s little time left to plan for the coming month. Instead of proactively planning ahead, team leaders are scrambling to catch up with current conditions.

When this many organizational functions hit the same wall, the cause is often structural: siloed data and planning systems that work in isolation and can’t sync in real time. That creates a disconnect between reality on the ground and static plans that can’t be updated fast enough.

This article covers why that disconnect happens, what changes when planning and execution share a common view, and how companies like Cheerz and Ankorstore are putting that into practice.

Every team brings different numbers to the same meeting

Data silos start with differing priorities. Sales, operations, and finance rarely define success the same way. Sales optimizes for revenue, operations for cost, and finance for cash flow. Each team pursues its own goal and tracks the data that ladders up to their objectives, with each set of numbers only defensible against a narrow, team-specific scope.

A sales forecast built to maximize volume can look perfectly reasonable to the team that built it. But execution might require more supply capacity than operations can afford or more cash upfront than finance wants to carry.

That means a single plan carries three different definitions of success, built on three different sets of numbers, well before anyone comes to the table to make a decision. That disagreement is baked into how each function generates its own figures in the first place, and it informs how teams determine which data is correct.

When those numbers live in separate spreadsheets, teams spend meeting time working out whose version is correct rather than working on a resolution. The planning session becomes a reconciliation session, while the actual decision stalls until figures align.

Spreadsheets can't keep three teams on the same plan

Spreadsheets remain the default tool for S&OP planning, despite the reconciliation problems they create. According to a November 2025 survey of 164 S&OP and IBP professionals, 81% of companies still run S&OP in Excel or Google Sheets, even at organizations with modern ERP systems already in place. 

The reason for this is flexibility - when circumstances change fast, planners need a tool that can meet them where the business is that month. ‘Bigger’ legacy solutions struggle in those moments, so teams default back to spreadsheets.

But reliance on spreadsheets carries measurable risk on two fronts: version control and plain error. As many as 94% of spreadsheets in active use today contain errors, and this rate only multiplies every time a plan changes hands between sales, operations, and finance.

In addition to being unreliable, spreadsheets used in supply chain planning provide limited visibility, as they can only capture a snapshot of a single moment in time. When supply or demand shifts, the plan and reality begin drifting apart with no warning signal, which means teams are planning against numbers that are already out of date. 

Version control issues are also created when multiple teams work on the same plan from separate spreadsheets. With many cooks in the kitchen, it becomes nearly impossible to track changes and authors, so nobody can say with confidence which version is actually current.

With a shared platform, one set of numbers becomes one decision

A unified platform brings demand signals, inventory positions, and financial constraints together in a single model, so every function works from the same data. A plan gets evaluated once against the same figures, so teams can move straight to the decision-making stage. Sales, operations, and finance are still optimizing for revenue, cost, and cash flow respectively; they're just working from one set of inputs instead of three.

On one platform, the supply plan and the budget pull from the same demand number, not a separate copy someone updates by hand. So if demand goes up, both reflect the change automatically, with no manual re-entry.

Cheerz, a French retail brand, shows the transformative power of a unified platform. Before Pigment, Cheerz relied on an internally built warehouse inventory system that wasn't automated. It also didn't connect to Cheerz's sales and demand data, so purchasing decisions still ran through Excel models that were only updated once a month. That monthly update cycle forced Cheerz to carry more stock than the business needed, just to cover the stretches between updates.

Once Cheerz rebuilt its Bill of Materials directly in Pigment, the team built a dedicated purchasing application that draws on that data to guide purchasing decisions. Every component could then be tracked separately, replacing the monthly snapshot with an accurate, up-to-date picture of stock levels across the business. Cheerz was able to cut stock levels by 30% by using Pigment to build a closer, real-time view of inventory, enabling faster reactions and freeing up working capital.

Live actuals sit beside the forecast

A unified platform also carries the advantage that supply teams can access their demand plan with actuals running alongside it, with alerts set up when the two drift apart. When orders come in well above forecast, the demand planner sees it immediately, aligns with supply on what to do, and only then changes the plan. When orders come in softer, the alert still matters: supply may not be able to adjust the same week, but it can decide whether to try.

That's the sort of job perfect for the always-on Analyst Agent: it keeps an eye on the gap between plan and reality, and flags when someone needs to act.

Wholesale marketplace Ankorstore knows the cost of a forecast that lags reality. With a catalog of more than 30,000 European brands, the team needed to give those brands reliable replenishment recommendations monthly, sometimes weekly. But they were generating them manually in Google Sheets, so the forecast rarely reflected what had happened in the market between updates.

Ankorstore rebuilt its replenishment process in Pigment in under 5 months, and the team adopted it within weeks. By feeding fulfillment data back into its demand signals on a cadence supply could plan against, Ankorstore improved forecast accuracy by 20% to 25% and cut the time spent on replenishment recommendations by a third.

See your plan come to life in Pigment

A plan that holds up under pressure starts with a platform that moves with the business.

See how Pigment brings demand, supply, and financial planning together in one place. The plan your team built is still the plan they're working from once it hits the floor, cycle after cycle, with no separate reconciliation effort required.

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