A CPG guide to starting your first S&OP Process
Most growing CPG brands don’t have a planning problem they can name. What they have is a vague sense that inventory decisions feel reactive, that cash keeps getting stuck in the wrong SKUs, and that the hero product goes out of stock more than it should. Underneath all of that is usually the same gap: no real S&OP process. So here’s a practical walkthrough of what to put in place, when to start, and how to keep it simple enough that it actually sticks.
I’ve stood up planning processes at brands at ten million, at fifty, at a hundred-plus, and the pattern holds at every size. The brands that pull out of the fire-drill cycle aren’t the ones with the biggest teams or the fanciest ERP. They’re the ones that put even a rough “S&OP lite” process in place, and uphold it. Size doesn’t fix this problem. A consistent process does.
So let me give you the rundown on “S&OP lite”, which is less about theory and more about what actually moves the needle when you’re small and growing fast.
Any cadence beats no cadence
There’s a common bias among smaller brands that goes something like, “we’re not big enough for S&OP yet.” A two-billion-dollar company runs it as a formal department with headcount and a full sales and operations planning function. You don’t have that, so you assume the whole thing is out of reach. Good news. It isn’t.
A spreadsheet with four meeting dates on the calendar beats nothing at all, and that’s the real floor. The threshold for needing S&OP planning isn’t a revenue number or a headcount, but the moment in time where it’s clear more than one person has to coordinate planning. If it all lives in one founder’s head and they can genuinely hold it, fine (but rare). The second there’s a handoff between two people, you need something written down.
The simplest version is almost embarrassingly basic. Two people sit in a room, and one says, here are the five decisions I make on this cadence, and here’s the information I need, with this much lead time, to make them well. The other figures out how to deliver it. You write those things down and you put them on the calendar, and that’s an S&OP process. Everything more sophisticated is just that same loop with more people and more detail.
What you’re really building is a feedback loop rather than a meeting series. Information goes out, the business responds, the results come back, and you adjust. Miss that circular part and you’ve just added status meetings to everyone’s week.
People, then process, then technology
This one trips up founders who came to CPG from outside the business world - people, then process, then technology.
People first means buy-in: the right people, with the right skillsets, in the room. Process second means figuring out how you actually work together efficiently and with results. Technology comes last, because a tool on top of a broken team or broken process doesn’t really offer much. Automation doesn’t make good decisions, it makes whatever decisions you were already making, just quicker, so if those were bad you’ve bought yourself expensive bad decisions at speed.
And this starts at the top. The founder doesn’t have to run the process, but they have to care that everyone’s working from one plan. When the founder notices that sales is building one model and ops is building another and says “wait, come together on this,” that single act of attention does more than any ERP or software. Without it, you get two departments running two different forecasts and finding out they disagreed only when something breaks.
One number everyone actually owns
You want one forecast that the whole company is accountable to, not a sales number living next to an ops number living next to a finance budget that all happen to share a deck. One number that everyone owns.
The trap is bad consensus planning, where the “agreed” number is really a compromise nobody believes in. Sales stays optimistic because sales sees volume everywhere. Ops leans conservative because it wants full trucks and long efficient runs. Finance mostly wants the revenue, margin, and working-capital goals hit. Average those into a mushy middle and you’ve got a number everyone can disown the moment it misses.
The fix is healthy conflict, had early, before the meeting rather than during it. Build the forecast bottom-up, where every assumption carries a reason you can trace. If someone wants to lift the baseline five percent, show me the why. Is there a shopper-marketing investment behind it, a syndicated trend, a real promo? Every element gets a reason attached, so when you miss, you’re debating a documented assumption instead of pointing fingers. The strongest version of this ties back to consumption, because what the shopper actually takes off the shelf is the truest read of demand, and everything downstream, what the distributor orders and what the retailer pulls, is a transformation of that.
If you want the culture to follow, stop rewarding departmental scorecards. Marketing can’t succeed if ops fails. A department head can ace their own review while there’s no money in the bank, and then there’s no bonus anyway. Point the incentives at the company’s success rather than the function’s, or the culture will slowly undo everything the process is trying to build.
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The signals you’ve outgrown the spreadsheet
You don’t need to guess when it’s time to invest in real tooling, because a few things tell you plainly.
If your monthly data refresh takes two, three, four days, you’ve outgrown it. I’ve watched a team of three spend four days just assembling the forecast before anyone could make a decision off it. If nobody trusts the data even when it arrives on time, that’s a worse signal than slowness. If you’re running true omnichannel, retail plus DTC plus Amazon plus some overseas wholesale, across multiple inventory locations, the spreadsheet starts hiding things you need to see. And if your bills of material are complex and your COGS is swinging up and down with inventory adjustments you can’t cleanly explain, that unreliability shows up later in the financials you hand to a lender or an investor.
The honest test for buying a tool is simple math. If the improvement outweighs the cost by whatever multiple your business requires, you do it, and when a system gives you five times back against a specific GL line, you’re not guessing anymore. But if you can’t even explain the number, fix the data and the process first, because a tool laid on top of a mess just gives you a faster, more expensive mess.
That points to the mindset shift that matters most, especially early. Founders get obsessive about forecast accuracy, about how close they landed to the number, and that’s the wrong scoreboard at your stage. You can miss a forecast by thirty percent and still have run a good process, as long as you saw the miss coming with enough lead time to make the buy, move the inventory, and soften the hit. Being right was never the goal. Having what you needed in time to act is the whole game.
Hire the right help
Bravo CPG is an embedded operations team for growth-stage food, beverage, beauty, and wellness brands. We take full ownership of production, co-man and 3PL management, demand planning, wholesale orders, freight, and more, pairing hands-on execution with senior-level accountability. Most of what I’ve described here, the planning cadence, the one-number forecast, the inventory visibility that finally gets everyone working off the same source of truth, is the connective tissue we build and run inside brands every day. If you’re growing fast and feeling the strain that comes with it, we help you scale without the operational chaos.
