Eric Wilson - What makes S&OP work globally: culture, consensus, and AI

In this episode, Ben and Wim talk to Eric Wilson, who spent 25 years running S&OP at manufacturers before moving to the educational side at the Institute of Business Forecasting and Planning (IBF), where he runs training, assessments and events. His latest book, Beyond Borders, is about S&OP across cultures.

Eric explains why culture is the silent killer of S&OP processes, the four factors that make them work, what people really mean when they say they don't trust the data, and where AI is helping S&OP today: translation, scenarios, routine work and cutting the latency of decisions.

In this episode

• (01:02) Into supply chain by accident, from running his own businesses
• (02:19) Beyond Borders: why culture and S&OP had never been put together
• (05:03) Hierarchical versus egalitarian decision-making, and why neither is wrong
• (08:32) "I was waiting for a pause": the executive forum that lost its best insight
• (10:24) The success factors: structure and cadence, collaboration, transparency, trust
• (11:28) Why one plan correlates with agility
• (12:49) "I don't trust the data": two thirds of time on wrangling, and the root cause underneath
• (13:55) People, process, data, analytics, technology, in that order
• (17:13) AI at the S&OP conferences: 60-70% hype, and what practitioners are asking
• (19:50) Where AI works today: communication, scenarios, routine tasks
• (22:22) The executive forum story: "it spoke my language, and it had my attention"
• (24:39) Using AI to challenge your own bias
• (25:49) Books and podcasts Eric recommends

Three quotes

"When you don't address culture, it can be a silent killer for a lot of S&OP processes."

"You're going to hear 'I didn't trust the data'. Underneath it is 'I didn't trust the person presenting the data'."

"It spoke my language. And it had my attention."

Questions this episode answers

What are the success factors of an S&OP process? According to Eric Wilson: structure and cadence, cross-functional collaboration around one plan, transparency including about what you don't know, and trust, which he calls the golden thread.

Why do S&OP processes fail? Often for reasons nobody planned for: cultural differences in how people decide, challenge and share, which show up as silence in meetings and as "I don't trust the data".

How is AI used in S&OP today? Mostly for communication (translating data into sales and finance language), scenario stress-testing and routine monthly tasks. Demand analytics is still, in Eric's words, "too dynamic" for most of the current use cases.

Resources Eric mentions: Beyond Borders (Eric Wilson) · The Practical Guide for Sales and Operations Planning (IBF) · Bram Desmet's books on supply chain metrics and finance · Supply Chain Now, the podcast by Scott Luton · the IBF On Demand podcast.