Sales and operations planning in the process industry: A literature review

This paper provides a systematic literature review of sales and operations planning (S&OP) in the process industries (PIs). The aim is to investigate the present state of S&OP in such industries in comparison with the discrete manufacturing sector and to identify the specific characteristics of PIs that can be influential at the S&OP level. Three bibliographic databases as well as gray literature were searched and as a result, 145 papers were reviewed based on their full texts. The findings show that the implementation of S&OP in PIs has not received much attention in the literature. Hence, there is a need for conceptual models with a focus on the specific characteristics of PIs. A comparison between PIs and discrete manufacturing industries in implementing the S&OP process is performed through an integrative S&OP framework and the differences are presented. The specific characteristics of PIs are scrutinized through the concept of the discretization decoupling point. PIs are hybrids of continuous production and discrete production (upstream and downstream of the discretization decoupling point), and the specific characteristics of PIs are related to the continuous production part. This paper contributes to the literature by identifying the specific characteristics of various types of PIs that can be added to the generic S&OP process which has originated in the discrete manufacturing industries. Practically, PIs can benefit from the consideration of the specific characteristics gathered in this paper in their S&OP processes.