Key takeaways
See our guide to maintenance planning and scheduling.
Sales and operations planning is a recurring, usually monthly, process that brings sales, operations, finance, and leadership together to agree one plan for the months ahead. The point is alignment: instead of sales promising volumes operations cannot make, or finance budgeting against a forecast nobody on the floor believes, everyone commits to one set of numbers and the trade-offs behind them.
A typical cycle moves through a few stages:
S&OP and the master production schedule are adjacent but distinct. S&OP works in aggregate (product families, monthly) and produces agreed volumes and priorities. The MPS takes those and commits to specific products on specific dates. S&OP decides the direction; the MPS executes it.
S&OP only works as a cross-functional process. Sales owns demand, operations owns supply, finance owns the money, and an executive sponsor owns the decisions. Missing any one turns it into a partial exercise: a demand plan with no supply reality, or a supply plan with no authority to act.
S&OP itself runs in your planning process, not in Fabrico . Where Fabrico strengthens it is the supply review: it gives operations the real, measured capacity and downtime of each line, so the supply commitment is grounded in what the floor actually delivers rather than an optimistic rate.
That keeps the agreed plan honest and the downstream MPS achievable. Fabrico is built and hosted in the EU with data residency in mind and is ISO 27001 certified. To bring a real capacity picture to your next supply review, book a demo .
S&OP works in aggregate (product families, monthly) and produces agreed volumes and priorities across sales, operations, and finance. The master production schedule turns those into specific build commitments by product and date. S&OP sets direction; the MPS executes it.
Most organisations run it on a monthly cycle, with the demand, supply, reconciliation, and executive reviews spread across the month. The cadence matters less than whether each cycle actually ends in decisions.
Usually because the meeting reviews data without making decisions, because there is no executive sponsor with authority to commit resources, or because the supply side plans against nameplate capacity instead of what the floor can really produce.
A realistic supply picture: demonstrated capacity, current downtime trends, and the constraints that limit output. Bringing measured numbers rather than rated ones is what keeps the agreed plan achievable.
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