Rising customer demand is the kind of pressure most manufacturers want, but here it exposed where the operation was thin. The sales and operations planning process and the inventory controls beneath it had not kept pace with the business, and as volume grew the cracks widened. Working capital was building up in finished-product inventory without a clear line back to true demand, and leadership needed confidence that service on the key SKUs would hold even as the operation right-sized what it carried.

Underneath the inventory numbers sat a structural planning problem. An S&OP maturity assessment scored each process area Red or Yellow and found gaps in every link of the chain: there was no constrained supply plan agreed between supply chain and operations, no Pre-S&OP review where sales directors weighed demand consensus against operational constraints, and demand planning that only surfaced at the executive strategy meeting without the channel directors who owned the forecast. The executive team was steering on the annual operating plan rather than a rolling 12-month view, supplier performance went unmeasured, and SKU segmentation was refreshed only once a year on percentage math that lacked statistical rigor.

Those gaps compounded. Without a constrained plan, a real demand consensus, or current segmentation, the operation defaulted to experience and tribal knowledge to decide what to hold, and incomplete inventory transactions left the records themselves unreliable. What leadership needed was not a one-time inventory cut but a planning system the business could run on its own: a repeatable cadence, clear ownership, and stock targets driven by demand and segmentation rather than guesswork.

POWERS started by measuring the current-state S&OP against best-practice S&OP, then built an action plan to close the gap from as-is to future state and quantified the gross-dollar inventory value at stake. The core deliverable was a rebuilt planning system: a defined S&OP process, policy, and cadence anchored by a Pre-S&OP meeting and an Executive S&OP meeting, so demand and supply were reconciled before decisions reached leadership and the executive team finally had operational feedback in front of it.

Several workstreams moved in parallel. A comprehensive, collaborative ABC product segmentation was established with its own consensus, policy, and cadence, and the demand plan was adjusted with handshake milestones on the aggregates so the forecast had real ownership. POWERS developed a 12-month supply plan that accounted for personnel, material, machine, and resource constraints, calculated safety-stock and cycle-stock targets off the new segmentation, and stood up DIFOT (delivered-in-full-on-time) ratings to hold suppliers to measured performance. A targeted inventory-accuracy initiative at the operations department repaired the transaction gaps so the records could be trusted, value-stream mapping of current and future state framed the lean improvements, and Power BI dashboards put live numbers in front of the Executive S&OP meeting while surfacing co-packer and internal manufacturing constraints.

Together these pieces replaced guesswork with a repeatable system. With stock targets set by segmentation, supply governed by a constrained plan, and clear ownership and cadence built in, the operation could carry far less finished-product inventory without putting service on its key SKUs at risk, and it could keep running the discipline long after the engagement closed.