SOP Distribution Scenario II 

  1. Sales plans are created decentrally by the company’s sales organizations and passed to head office.
  2. Head office creates an overall production plan based on the cumulated sales plans, perhaps adjusting the targets set by the individual sales organizations, and then distributes production quotas to each of the company’s plants.
  3. These, in turn, report their ability to meet these targets back to head office, which adjusts the production quotas as necessary. Reasons why production plants might not be able to meet the central targets include machine failure or a staff shortage.

The planning table contains a line showing the difference between the quotas set by head office and those set decentrally.

Because the criteria which determine a sales plan are very different from the criteria which determine a production plan, there is no need for the sales planner and the production planner to communicate directly with each other. Sales and production are planned in separate information structures, with head office using SOP’s key figure copy function to create the overall production plan in step 2.