Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP): About Meritor: Headquartered in Troy, Mich., United States, Meritor is a leading global supplier of drivetrain, mobility, braking and aftermarket solutions for commercial vehicle and industrial customers around the world. Meritor supplies drivetrain systems and components including axles, drivelines, braking and suspension systems, primarily for medium- and heavy-duty trucks in North America, South America, Europe, China, India and Australia. This segment also supplies components for defense, construction, bus and coach, mining, fire and emergency applications. The Challenge: Once we all agreed on a plan, the precious time that we lost managing the monster started eating into our supply lead times. These delays in turn manifested themselves in late shipments due to components not being available. Customers started to penalize us for our delays and, thereafter, started to cancel orders. Since our lead times were so long, these cancellations were occurring while the raw materials were already in transit or in production, creating huge levels of slow moving and obsolete inventory (SLOB). After the company lost millions on SLOB inventory, the executive team finally agreed we needed to develop a better process and invest in software to help improve business planning. In addition, various business functions remain very silo’d across the organization including product development, finance, operations and sales/ marketing. You’re probably thinking at this point, perfect, happy ending, you’re getting software! Sadly, the pain has just begun. It was 100% the correct choice to adopt new software, however, selecting the correct one for the business is not a trivial task. Current environment: Manufacturing & Industrial Product count: 40,000 end items Revenue: $3.8B COGS: $1.5B Avg Inventory : $300M Inventory Turns & Target: 5 (8 = target) Forecast accuracy / bias [target]: 65%, +20% [target: 80%, -/+10%] Supply Chain Led Project: Develop a Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) process and select software solution that will drive the needed improvements across the organization The proposal should include: Develop selection criteria and weighting to choose an S&OP technology solution; what are the costs? this should include software costs, support costs and any related implementation cost; comparison of various options; what if we use Excel? What would you recommend? (This should be a given, but have a well-researched, cost-benefit analysis on more than one software option)