Supply chain advisor Stephan de Wit on the performance management gap that keeps organisations explaining last month instead of shaping next quarter.
Most S&OP performance issues trace back to a steering problem. The planning cycle produces output but doesn't change outcomes. Teams leave meetings aligned. The gaps stay open anyway.
The root cause is fragmented ownership. Finance owns the numbers. Supply chain owns execution. Commercial owns demand. Nobody owns the integrated result.
Closing it requires explicit end-to-end ownership, planning connected directly to strategic objectives, and leadership that decides inside the process rather than after it.
Organisations that underperform on S&OP usually look at the forecast first, then the tooling, then the process design. Stephan de Wit, supply chain advisor at Quicksilver Consultancy, starts somewhere else.
"Planning is done to produce a plan," he says. "But it was designed to steer an organisation forward. That distinction gets lost in most organisations."
The steering layer is where it breaks.
Planning cycles run on schedule. Dashboards get maintained. KPIs get reviewed. Meetings happen every month. And still, the business doesn't perform the way it should.
"The process runs," Stephan says. "But it doesn't steer."
In practice, teams present forecasts rather than challenge them. Targets come up in the meeting but don't become actions. Managers postpone decisions, or make them outside the process entirely.
"If the outcome of an S&OP meeting is 'we're aligned' and that counts as success, that's not what it was designed to be," Stephan says. "A few weeks later, nothing has changed."
Next month, same cycle.
In the organisations Stephan works with, the same pattern appears. Sales and operations run on different numbers. Finance doubts both. KPIs get reviewed in the meeting but don't drive action. If a key person is absent, no one knows where the plan stands. The S&OP meeting runs. Nobody decides.
"Shared responsibility is no responsibility," Stephan says. "You can see it in the next planning cycle, because nobody holds each other accountable."
At a Dutch consumer packaged goods manufacturer, that pattern became concrete. Growth targets stayed in place while the assumptions underneath had already shifted. New innovations were expected to deliver 20% of total revenue, a figure that didn't hold once the numbers were tested. One distribution centre sat at 98% capacity while a second had room to spare. Sales in one country lagged the plan, and nobody owned the gap.
"The targets were still there," Stephan says. "But no one owned the gap, or the actions needed to close it."
The costs from a broken performance management layer don't appear in one place. Each one lands in a different department, and nobody adds them up.
At the planner level, the work turns repetitive: flagging problems that managers don't act on. "When planners raise issues and nobody responds," Stephan says, "you eventually see turnover. That costs money indirectly."
Decisions made without scenario insight erode margin. Teams miss revenue because they adjust after the fact, not before it. "With a good system, you can signal and look forward," Stephan says. "You can act in advance. Instead, you're losing money you don't know you're losing."
Gaps nobody flags turn into crises. Each one pulls planners away from work that should be building the next cycle.
Stephan runs a five-level analysis on this and reaches the same conclusion every time.
Nobody owns the integrated outcome. Ownership runs along functional lines: finance owns the numbers, supply chain owns execution, commercial owns demand. Nobody owns the result.
That split persists because organisations built planning as a coordination layer. It stays that way because planning never connected to strategic objectives, the OKR logic of what you're trying to achieve, how you measure it, and what actions follow. "The OKR thinking is missing," Stephan says.
"We have a reviewer. We don't have a decision-maker."
The decision-maker Stephan points to is the CEO, or whoever holds genuine cross-functional authority. "Finance looks at the financial result. Supply checks feasibility. Commercial says what the client expects. Those three can sit in opposition. Someone needs to break the impasse," he says. "Without that, every integrated planning programme eventually stalls."
Organisations that have closed this gap make one shift: they stop treating alignment as the measure of success.
The planning meeting ends with different questions. What are we going to change? Where are we off track? Who owns this?
"Forecasts are no longer accepted as facts," Stephan says. "They're challenged as assumptions. Inventory isn't a supply chain KPI, it's a business decision. Margin isn't something for finance to report afterwards, it belongs in the planning conversation itself."
Ownership becomes explicit: one person, one gap, one mandate to act.
Stephan describes the shift in eight principles: end-to-end ownership of outcomes, OKRs connected directly to the planning rhythm, KPIs that trigger action rather than explain results, profitability built into every planning decision, a strict cycle discipline that keeps decisions inside the process, a culture of constructive challenge across functions, active leadership in the meeting room, and forward-looking planning driven by scenario modelling.
One principle stands out as the most underestimated: leadership inside the process. "Leiderschap in het proces," as Stephan calls it. Leadership that decides in the meeting rather than reviewing its output.
Five years ago, scenario modelling wasn't part of a standard monthly planning cycle. Running alternatives took weeks. By the time results were ready, the window for action had often closed.
"You can bring the process from weeks down to hours, days," Stephan says. "And you can use AI to look forward: to model scenarios, to calculate them, to predict what different futures look like."
Scenarios that previously required weeks to model now take hours. A question like "what happens if demand drops in Q3?" gets answered during the planning conversation, not three weeks after it.
AI tooling handles data preparation, one of the largest time costs for planners. "Planners spend less time cleaning data," Stephan says. "They spend more time making decisions."
Planners move from correction work to decision work.
Planners work differently when performance management runs properly.
"More steering. Less firefighting," Stephan says. "Less explaining. More scenario-based, forward-looking work. When a deviation occurs, you can act on it immediately rather than presenting it in next month's meeting."
Planning models get configured in days rather than months. Data preparation shrinks. Building scenarios moves from a separate three-week project into the standard planning conversation.
"The work becomes smarter, faster, and simpler," Stephan says. "And planners become business partners rather than reporting machines."
Stephan closed the webinar with three:
"If these questions create debate in your team," Stephan says, "that's usually where the real opportunity is."
Organisations that run planning cycles but don't steer through them reach quarter-end with explanations. Forecasts went unchallenged. KPIs explained the past. Alignment counted as success.
The fix doesn't begin with tooling. It begins with who owns the outcome, whether leadership decides inside the process, and whether planning connects to where the business is trying to go.
"One integrated plan that everyone stands behind, with leadership behind it," Stephan says. "Scenario-based working. OKRs connected to planning. And above all: explicit ownership and leadership in the process."
With those elements in place, planning meetings produce decisions. The business knows where it stands before the quarter ends.
In S&OP coordination, the planning cycle produces alignment between functions. Teams present their domain view, agree on a number, and leave. In performance management, the cycle produces decisions, assigns explicit ownership over outcomes, and drives action before gaps materialise. Teams stop measuring success by whether they left the room aligned. They measure it by what changed.
Most organisations designed their KPIs to report, not to steer. Conversations in the meeting stop at explaining why a metric deviated. Nobody models what could change the outcome. Without scenario thinking in the cycle, KPIs describe what happened last month. The question of what to do next doesn't get asked.
One function or role needs end-to-end accountability for the integrated outcome. Shared accountability across finance, supply chain, and commercial is how the ownership gap opens. Stephan points to the CEO, or whoever holds genuine cross-functional authority, as the only role that can hold commercial, supply, and financial planning to a single integrated plan.
AI cuts the time between question and answer. Scenario modelling that previously took weeks now takes hours. AI tooling handles data preparation, freeing planners from correction work. Planners run forward-looking scenario analysis inside the planning cycle rather than in a separate project that finishes too late to act on.
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