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Business analytics - Driven sales & operations planning in new product development for consumer-packaged goods companies
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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en
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75
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Consumer-packaged goods industry (CPG) is highly competitive and requires companies to continuously innovate through new product development (NPD). One of the key factors for NPD success is ensuring that challenges during the supply chain planning phase are addressed and solved. A systematic and efficient Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) framework is an important tool to help with this by aligning operations horizontally across functions and vertically with business strategies. Additionally, business analytics (BA) tools are continuously evolving and have been applied successfully in various business aspects, including supply chain management. Applications of BA, including descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive, have the potential to tackle uncertainty when planning NPD.
This thesis aims to develop a framework to integrate BA tools in S&OP planning process, specifically in the context of NPD. In order to achieve the thesis’s objective, literature review and semi-structured interviews are used as research methods. The literature review goes through past studies on the topics of NPD, S&OP and BA to identify gaps and review existing S&OP and NPD frameworks. Semi-structured interviews are then conducted on five CPG companies to investigate their current needs and challenges and possible improvement in the utilization of BA in their processes. The results showed that there were some gaps in literature on how to address unique NPD challenges in S&OP process. At the same time, there is a lack of study on BA integration in S&OP, especially around collaboration aspects. Interview results, in addition, showed that CPG companies mainly struggled with uncertainty when planning NPD in the long horizon, leading to conflicts between different teams. There is also a common trend in their need to integrate machine learning for forecasting and scenario planning in many S&OP steps.
The detailed BA-driven S&OP framework in this thesis can be applied empirically for CPG companies to improve their efficiency and NPD success rate. It also contributes to addressing the gaps in literature on S&OP, NPD, and BA topics and provides a foundation for future research on practical implications and refinement of the framework in various industries and geographical regions.