An increasingly competitive and fast-changing environment forces companies to be more agile, change their plans more frequently, and move away from having independent planning processes. Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) is a process that provides management with the means to strategically control a business by aligning all functions with the overall business strategy. The process integrates all plans and functions of the business to create alignment.

S&OP has been practiced in the industry for over 20 years, but it is only recently that the interest for this subject has grown in academia. The research literature covers different aspects of S&OP, but there is a lack of well-developed process frameworks that also covers the aspect of centralization. To develop a detailed S&OP process framework, that is also applicable on a company with varying degrees of centralization in its organization, a case study on a manufacturing company was conducted. Data was collected through interviews and observations by participating in meetings and working sessions. The company currently has varying degrees of centralization in different regions, as well as different S&OP processes. The findings in the case company were synthesized with literature to produce the resulting S&OP process framework. The result is a five-step S&OP process framework that describes, in more detail than existing literature, how a manufacturing company with varying degrees of centralization in it organization should run its S&OP processes. The resulting S&OP process framework shows that there are seven key factors affecting an S&OP process in a manufacturing company, and that the level of centralization in an organization mostly affects at which hierarchical level different activities are performed.