Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,7, University of Munster (Lehrstuhl fur Wirtschaftsinformatik und Logistik), language: English, abstract: Economic developments such as growing globalization, market uncertainty, increasing customer demands, shorter product life-cycles and rising supply chain interconnectedness as well as product complexity require companies to be even more responsive to market conditions in order to improve their competitiveness. Higher competitiveness as a whole company can only be achieved by an increased cross-functional alignment and collaboration within the company and with external suppliers and customers. Evolving from aggregated production planning and manufacturing resource planning, sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a business process supported by information technology (IT) that aims at aligning sales and production both intra-organizational and inter-organizational across the supply chain. S&OP is only seldom introduced at once in a big bang approach. Thus, companies should strive to continuously improve their intra- and inter-organizational alignment and S&OP process. A maturity model (MM) can help to assess the current state of the S&OP implementation and can direct the continuous improvement along predefined coordination mechanisms and dimensions. Further benefits of applying MMs in the context of S&OP should be identified during this thesis. Furthermore, a general characterization of MMs should be presented and adopted to S&OP maturity assessment. As MMs are published by researchers and practitioners (mainly consultancies and analysts), this thesis further aims at determining from which publishing stream a MM should be taken in order to assess the S&OP maturity of a company and to direct further improvements in maturity. This may also result in a proposition for a concrete MM to use.
