The Infinite Game of S&OP
Executive Insight | September 21, 2026
S&OP is evolving from a planning process into an adaptive strategic game. Across more than 250 transformations, only 2% of companies have reached the level at which S&OP dynamically connects strategy, finance, supply and growth. StrataGame is my name for that stage. It puts people back at the centre, with control yielding to questioning and the defence of the plan to adaptation. Artificial intelligence excels at calculation and at exploring alternatives. What it lacks is any share in the consequences, and in the end someone must weigh the whole picture and take a decision they are prepared to own. Judgement of that kind remains a human prerogative.
Two views of S&OP are doing the rounds at the moment. According to the first, it is dead. The second has artificial intelligence running it before long, with no need for us at all. Different as they sound, they rest on the same misunderstanding. Each takes S&OP for a procedure, something built from numbers and tools that could as easily be handed to a machine. They would be right, if that were all it was. At its best it is a way of working, a strategic conversation in which the people who run a business analyse what is happening and decide what to do about it. That is where a strategy is put to work and, when events require it, changed.
An agentic S&OP runs into the same difficulty. The purpose of the practice is to bring the different functions of a business into one room and, by obliging them to act in concert, to arrive at a plan that all of them share and are prepared to defend. The value is created in the working together far more than in the plan that comes out of it, which is what Eisenhower meant when he said that plans are nothing and planning is everything.
That dependence on people is also why the performance of S&OP varies so much from one organisation to the next. In some companies it does little more than keep the supply chain under control, while in others it is the means by which the annual budget is delivered. At its most developed, it becomes the instrument through which a business steers its strategy.
In my experience, the difference comes down entirely to leadership, to the person at the top of the company and to whoever has been given S&OP to run, and there is no algorithm that can take their place.
Pioneers rather than companies
Since Dick Ling created it in the mid 1980s, S&OP has spread steadily across industries and around the world, which I take to be a sign of considerable vitality. Companies such as Danone, Mars, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are often held up as the best exponents of S&OP. Yet new, radical ways of working are invented by individuals rather than by organisations, and the history of S&OP owes far more to a handful of pioneers than to any particular industry.
Before turning to what they did, one caution is needed. It is difficult to prove a direct link between the standard of a company’s S&OP and its results. S&OP does not by itself add a pound to revenue or to EBITDA. What it produces is better conversations, and the decisions that come out of them. When those are reached quickly and applied consistently they ought, in time, to show in the results, but there is no formula that converts a stronger S&OP into a predictable increase in profit.
In the 1990s a team of leaders at Scottish & Newcastle, working with Andy Coldrick, who with Dick Ling had created breakthrough S&OP, set out to make a step change in the way they ran S&OP so that it steered the whole enterprise rather than the supply chain alone. The name they gave it was Integrated Business Management, a full ten years before IBP became the fashionable three-letter acronym, and it was a story of people who happened to be in the beer trade. I would never claim that Integrated Business Management raised the company’s share price. What can be said is that in 2008 Carlsberg and Heineken bought Scottish & Newcastle for £7.8 billion, at roughly a 50% premium to the price before the bid.
In the following decade Syngenta, again with Andy Coldrick’s support, became the first company to run a global S&OP at the level of strategy. The business situation was calling for a breakthrough, and the strategic marketing function understood that S&OP could serve strategy and marketing as well as supply, which was unusual thinking at the time. Syngenta had been formed in 2000 with a market value of around CHF 7 billion, and by 2014 it was worth around CHF 35 billion, five times as much. I do not suggest that S&OP produced that result. What the company had done was to make S&OP into something far larger than a supply chain process, the place where the business confronted reality and made its choices, and in which strategy was joined to execution. When the wind blew in the right direction, they were organised to catch it.
After more than thirty years in this field, I have learned to pay attention to coincidences of that kind, because the more developed S&OP becomes the harder it is to isolate what it contributed. When it is used to address operational questions, you can credit it with a gain in forecast accuracy or a fall in inventory. Once it is steering strategy, however, it becomes almost impossible to say what belongs to S&OP and what to anything else, because at that level it has become the way the whole business is run.
Both of these companies reached the strategic level of S&OP, and they reached it two decades ago. What these examples show is that the secret has little to do with the process, which has long since become a commodity, and a great deal to do with persuading a company’s leaders to play the same game, and with a willingness to change its rules when circumstances require. What follows is the step beyond, still rare and still taking shape, and the reason I have given it a name of its own.
StrataGame, the step beyond IBP
Having watched the development of S&OP at close quarters since the early 1990s, and taken part in a good deal of it, I see a need now to take the practice past IBP. The step I have in mind is S&OP played as a strategic game and fused with strategy itself, in the same way that it was merged with the budget in the 1990s by a few leading companies, Mars among them.
StrataGame is S&OP played as a strategic game, where strategy is shaped rather than received. It orchestrates strategy in both directions, from the top down and from the bottom up, and adapts to its context, knowing when to look three years ahead and when to look closely at a single detail.
In practice, the difference from breakthrough S&OP or IBP begins with the place of strategy. It stops being the yearly input that the process exists to execute, and is instead steered inside S&OP month by month, changing there when the context requires it. That, more than anything else, is the break with what went before.
Everything else follows from a single idea, which is that the team plays a game rather than running a process. Just as a football team plays total football or catenaccio, each company has a recognisable style, one that serves a purpose fitted to its own situation. There is therefore no single model that suits everyone, although all of them share certain characteristics.
The style dictates the rigour. Choose American football and you need absolute precision and attention to every detail, whereas rugby at its French best thrives on freedom within a framework. The leader fits the game rather than the organisation chart, so that a fluid style calls for a strategic leader who fully empowers the team, while a structured one needs someone who lives in the detail. The team plays for a single leading KPI that makes the strategic difference, as Velocity did for Danone in the 2010s. And every one of them has an iconic template at the heart of its S&OP, whether the BCG matrix at Syngenta or the celebrated 6BOX at Scottish & Newcastle, with its six boxes for previous assumptions, new assumptions, opportunities, risks, decisions made and decisions required.
Game, rigour, leader, KPI and template do not form a checklist, and they either hold together or they do not. The game determines the rigour, which in turn determines the leader, and all three serve one KPI anchored by a single standard template. That congruence is what I mean by StrataGame.
It could reasonably be argued that this is simply state of the art S&OP or IBP, and the numbers are the answer. Across more than 250 S&OP and IBP projects I have seen all five characteristics together only five times. Put another way, 85% of companies use S&OP to run their operating plan, 13% use it to execute their strategy, and 2% play it as a strategic game. The 2% are set apart less by the quality of their analysis, than by how their people behave and decide under pressure.
Why so many S&OP implementations fail
S&OP was born in the 1980s, when management placed great faith in procedure and control, an approach that true Lean, with its insistence on growing people rather than turning them into cogs, defeated forty years ago. Yet ask an S&OP leader how the process works and you will usually be shown a flow chart of inputs and outputs, meetings and attendees, in which the people rarely appear.
An EVP of Operations at a ten billion euro business once told me, “I have implemented all the processes and tools, but people do not apply them.” A one size fits all, process-driven S&OP emerged from a management culture that prized procedure above all, and then had to survive in organisations where principles are made real through people and local judgement. Where it was imposed as dogma it lost its purpose, and where the culture was built into its design and its introduction it thrived and lasted. That is why the approach described here puts people ahead of process and tools, since the breakthrough comes from trust and transparency, and from people working as a team, rather than from a new template. It looks like common sense, but as Andy Coldrick liked to say, common sense is not so common.
The difference between a plan and a play
Tom Wallace records that Executive S&OP, the process rather than the term, was invented in the late 1970s at Abbott Laboratories in the US Pharmaceutical Division, and that at the time they called it Game Planning.
A plan and a play are different things. With a plan you expect reality to follow, whereas in a game you know that it will not. A plan assumes a world that is linear and controllable, while a play expects opponents and conditions that keep changing, so that instead of executing it in sequence you read the situation in front of you and adjust, and then you play again.
A leading food company in Russia had run S&OP for more than a decade, with strong process, high compliance and rigorous reviews. It had a yearly operating plan and executed it well, until the chairman observed that year after year the business was drifting away from its strategy, and declared that something had broken. I was called in to diagnose the problem and found that execution was the least of their worries. The company was playing the wrong game, and doing so perfectly well. It was something closer to American football, with a detailed playbook and roles so specialised that they encouraged silo thinking, and with such a concern for control that no room was left to improvise.
The team was of a very high calibre, and its members understood that they had to play a different game, more like total rugby to stay with the sporting metaphor, with greater freedom and more empowerment, and with a move away from their functional loyalties, which in that culture is a considerable challenge. The heart of the approach was to couple that freedom with accountability, supported by transparency about the assumptions behind the numbers, and it was this that delivered the trust needed to get back on course with the strategy.
By the end of the year the business unit had delivered in line with its strategic plan, with value growth of 20%, volume up by 2.5% and market share ahead by 0.7 points, among the strongest results in its history. The chief executive said afterwards that it would have been impossible without breakthrough S&OP, and that year the group treated Russia as a best practice market.
The lesson applies more widely. The harder the conditions, the more a business needs to reinforce the fundamentals of collaboration, time, trust and transparency, together with a T-shaped attitude. Dick Ling, the father of S&OP, put it best when he said that the task is to find the maestros and set them free.
Where to implement AI
Whether to use AI is no longer in doubt, and the question that remains open is where to stop. Calculation is plainly its territory, while the sensing and judging that come before a decision, and the responsibility that follows it, must remain human prerogatives. The mechanical part of our work is safe enough in its hands. The danger lies in the way it gradually supplies us with insight and hindsight, sparing us the effort of study and, with it, the habit of thinking.
A familiar example shows where the line falls. AI can build the statistical model that calculates the baseline, provided it proves itself better than the conventional techniques of regression and exponential smoothing. It can assemble the activities that bridge the gap between the baseline and the plan, whether budget or strategy, and generate scenarios by varying the assumptions behind them, along with the risks and opportunities. Further still, it can manage the activities themselves, their stages, history, documents and the decisions they require, which is to say everything that can be automated. What it cannot do is the intuitive part, which in the end is a bet on the future, and a bet calls for sensing and judgement, then a decision, and finally someone to answer for it.
I learnt this long ago as a young business planner, when I realised that an excess of calculation can kill the appetite for growth. Worse, an overemphasis on forecast accuracy holds a business back of its own accord, because it drives a conservative view, and there is always an element of hope in growth that no system can compute.
I call it the GPS effect. Satellite navigation made us comfortable driving wherever we pleased, and anyone who remembers being lost at night in the middle of nowhere, trying to read a map by torchlight, knows what it replaced. Over time we came to lean on it, and the sense of direction we once had, built by making our brains work with paper and memory, gradually faded. While the device works we are fine. When it fails, many of us discover how much orientation we have lost. In the same way, a fully autonomous S&OP would cost us our judgement and our capacity to decide, and in the end our sense of ownership.
Machines can help us to decide, and yet the decision cannot be theirs because they carry none of the consequences. It is striking that the larger the organisation, the more thinly those consequences are spread, which makes it ideal territory for the machine to take over. We saw it happen with ERP and APS systems. I once heard a demand planner say in a demand review, “the machine has spoken.” AI has the same intrusive potential, an order of magnitude greater, and that is precisely why we need S&OP to become more human rather than less. The faster the world moves, the more we need people who will answer for what they decide, and entrepreneurs know how much readiness of mind that takes.
A mirror, rather than a checklist
In the traditional arrangement the accountable leader stands at the top and the functions report upwards, which is still a model of control. Played this way, the leader’s role changes, and controlling each function gives way to making the whole team play together. The questions that follow have been refined over many years of S&OP work, and they deserve candid answers. They are a mirror rather than a checklist for scoring others.
Do I demonstrate through action rather than words that S&OP is vital to executing strategy, owning the why and the what while letting my teams own the how?
Does each cycle open with a strategic question rather than the reading of a dashboard?
Is each cycle anchored on a single strategic question, aligned to a twenty-four month intent, instead of an ever-growing list of priorities?
Have I created the conditions for teams to self-organise within the strategic intent, with mutual help as a structural principle and execution rigour in the culture?
Am I using the reconciliation meeting to draw out the crucial conversations, or letting it become a rehearsal for what will be presented at the final S&OP meeting?
Would I say finance holds a decisive leadership role in S&OP, or is it still treating the process as a supply chain matter it has to shoulder?
When performance management turns a red KPI green, has the system improved, or has the cycle stopped short of acting on the cause?
How long the game lasts
The philosopher James Carse drew the distinction between finite games, which are played to be won, and infinite games, whose object is to continue. S&OP is an infinite game, and StrataGame is the form it takes in the world as it now is.
The infinite game has one rule that is easy to lose sight of, which is that you never win it. You only remain worthy of continuing to play. The day your S&OP fully satisfies you, or you come to believe a machine can run it for you, is the moment you have begun to lose. So never be complacent. Find what makes you singular, and what you still need to improve. And then ask yourself what you will do differently on Monday. The Infinite Game stops when you lose your Game Intelligence.
Sources
Tom Wallace, S&OP Costs and Benefits, The Financial View of Implementing Executive S&OP
Value Games, based on a database of more than 250 S&OP and IBP transformations across industries and around the world
About the author
Alain Perrot, a food engineer, is Founder and Chairman of Value Games. In over 40 years in supply chain, he held executive roles at Mars, Bestfoods and Air Liquide, then became partner at LingColdrick, the pioneers of S&OP. He has led over 250 S&OP or IBP projects worldwide, co-authored La Boîte à outils de la Supply Chain and created the Value Race business game.