S&OP Meeting Agenda Template + Roles Checklist

A bad S&OP meeting agenda is the difference between a 90-minute decision and a three-hour status update that decides nothing. I've run the monthly cycle at a $250M manufacturer, and the single biggest lever on meeting quality was a tight agenda with named owners and a hard rule: no surprises in the executive review. This is the s&op meeting agenda template I'd hand a new planning lead, broken out by each meeting in the cycle, plus the roles checklist that keeps people from showing up empty-handed.

The principle: each meeting feeds the next

The five S&OP meetings are a relay, not five separate events. The demand review produces the consensus forecast the supply review reacts to. The supply review surfaces the gaps the pre-S&OP turns into scenarios. The pre-S&OP hands the executive review three options and a recommendation. If any handoff is sloppy, the executive meeting becomes a data dump.

Rule that fixes 80% of bad meetings: the executive S&OP sees zero new data. Everything is pre-decided or pre-framed in the pre-S&OP. The exec meeting only chooses.

Meeting 1: Demand Review (60-75 min)

Owner: Demand planning lead. Attendees: sales ops, marketing, product, key account leads.

Agenda:

• Last month's accuracy and bias by family (10 min). Start with the scoreboard.
• Statistical baseline walkthrough for A/X families (15 min).
• Demand drivers: promotions, pricing, new accounts, churn, macro (20 min).
• Consensus adjustments, with the assumption behind each override stated out loud (20 min).
• Sign-off: one demand plan, units and dollars (10 min).

The non-negotiable: every manual override to the statistical baseline gets a reason and an owner. "Sales feels good about Q3" is not a reason. "Three named accounts confirmed reorders worth 8% of family volume" is.

Meeting 2: Supply Review (60 min)

Owner: Supply planning / ops lead. Attendees: production, procurement, logistics, plant managers.

Agenda:

• Plan attainment last month: did we deliver the committed plan? (10 min)
• Capacity load vs. the new demand plan by line/plant (20 min).
• Material and supplier constraints, lead-time changes (15 min).
• Inventory position by purpose: cycle, safety, E&O (10 min).
• Named constraints and the where-we-can't-cover list (5 min).

The output is a constrained supply plan that says yes, no, or yes-but-here's-the-cost on every family. Don't let this turn into a capacity-excuse session. Constraints get named and quantified, not litigated.

Meeting 3: Pre-S&OP / Reconciliation (75-90 min)

Owner: S&OP lead. Attendees: demand lead, supply lead, finance partner, product.

This is the meeting that earns its keep. Agenda:

• Reconcile demand vs. supply: where are the gaps? (20 min)
• Financial check: does the plan hit the revenue and margin target? Quantify the gap (20 min).
• Build 2-3 scenarios for each open gap with cost and service impact (30 min).
• Recommendation per decision, with a clear ask of the executives (15 min).
• Build the executive deck: decisions only, no raw data (5 min).

If the pre-S&OP can't reach a recommendation, that's fine, but it must frame the trade-off cleanly. The exec meeting decides; it doesn't analyze.

Meeting 4: Executive S&OP (60-90 min)

Owner: GM or VP Supply Chain, with the CFO present. Attendees: functional VPs.

Agenda:

• KPI scorecard: accuracy, bias, attainment, inventory vs. plan, service (10 min).
• Approve the demand and supply plan, or send back specific items (15 min).
• Decide each gap-closing scenario: build ahead, add shift, expedite, cut forecast, raise price (30 min).
• Confirm financial reconciliation: plan vs. budget, margin impact (15 min).
• Assign owners and dates to every decision (10 min).

If this meeting runs long or reopens analysis, the pre-S&OP failed. Send it back.

Roles checklist

The one role mid-market teams skip is a dedicated S&OP lead who owns the cadence end to end. Without it, the process becomes whoever's calendar is least busy, and discipline rots inside two cycles.

Common agenda failures

• No scoreboard up front. If you don't open with last month's accuracy and attainment, you're not closing the loop on accountability.
• Raw data in the exec meeting. Decisions slow to a crawl when VPs see numbers for the first time.
• No owner or date on decisions. A decision without a name and a deadline is a suggestion.
• Overrides with no logged assumption. You can't improve a forecast you can't trace.

The spreadsheet tax

Most of the friction in these meetings is data wrangling, not judgment. Planners spend the days before each meeting reconciling versions instead of analyzing. A connected planning platform like Pigment lets demand, supply, and finance work the same model so the scorecard, the scenarios, and the financial reconciliation are live, not stitched together the night before. That's what makes a 90-minute executive meeting possible.

Get the template applied to your business

We run a free planning-maturity and stranded-inventory teardown that includes a review of your current S&OP cadence against this agenda, where the handoffs break, and a dollar estimate of inventory trapped by weak gap-closing. Book a call and we'll redline your actual meeting structure with you.