Information Sharing in Sales and Operations Planning: Contextualized Solutions and Mechanisms

We develop actionable design propositions for collaborative sales and operations planning (S&OP) based on the observation of contexts in which benefits are generated — or are absent — from retail information sharing. An information sharing pilot project in a real-life setting of two product manufacturers and one retailer was designed. The project resulted in one manufacturer, serving a retailer from its local factory, developing a process for collaborative S&OP, while the other manufacturer serving a retailer from more distant regional factories abandoned the process. The evaluation of the outcomes experienced by the two manufacturers allows us to examine contexts in fine-grained detail and explain why introducing information sharing in the S&OP processes produce — or fail to produce — benefits. The paper contributes to the supply chain information sharing literature by presenting a field tested and evolved S&OP design for non-standard demand situations, and by a contextual analysis of the mechanisms that produce the benefits of retailer collaboration and information sharing in the S&OP process.