Most SIOP processes are status meetings with spreadsheets or slides.
SIOP should bridge daily execution and annual plans. The cadence where sales, operations, and finance get aligned on what's actually happening and what to do about it. Most processes feel like a review. PDL builds SIOP systems that force productive tension and decision making.
What We Look At:
Strategic Alignment. Whether SIOP connects to the annual plan and the longer-term strategy, or operates as its own disconnected loop.
Cadence & Structure. How often the process runs, what agenda anchors it, and whether it's stable enough to be a real planning rhythm or just a calendar event.
Participation. Who's in the room, who's missing, and whether the people present have the authority to actually make decisions.
Data Foundation. The numbers feeding the process — whether they're trustworthy, current, and shared in time for participants to come prepared.
Cross-Functional Tension. Whether the hard tradeoffs between sales, operations, and finance are being surfaced and resolved, or being avoided.
Decisions & Accountability. What the process produces. Real decisions with owners and timelines, or action items that recur month after month.
What an Engagement Looks Like:
Every SIOP engagement starts the same way. The shape it takes from there depends on what the audit surfaces.
The Foundation (Always):
Discovery call. A conversation about how planning currently works in your business. The annual cycle, the monthly rhythm if one exists, the daily decisions that don't trace back to either. No assumptions about whether you need a new process, a better one, or a rebuild.
SIOP audit. A structured evaluation across the six systems above. What's working, what isn't, where the process is producing real decisions, and where it's become a meeting that runs on calendar invites alone.
The Path (Depends on the Audit):
Design & Implementation. You don't have a formal SIOP process yet. Annual planning happens, daily execution happens, and the months in between run on instinct or behind closed doors. PDL designs the cadence, agenda, participants, and data foundation, then runs the first cycles with you to build the discipline.
Improvement. You have a SIOP process. It runs on schedule, the right people are mostly in the room, but something isn't landing. Decisions don't change behavior. Tradeoffs get postponed. PDL identifies the specific failure points and redesigns the parts of the process that aren't doing their work.
Rescue. The process has degraded. Meetings get skipped, agendas drift, attendance rotates, and nobody respects it as a decision-making forum anymore. PDL rebuilds with new structure, new sponsorship, and a clear reset on what the process is for.
The Close (Always):
Roadmap. A clear sequence for what comes next, including how SIOP connects to the rest of the business: strategy, operations, sales, and the data infrastructure that supports the cadence.
Measurement framework. Outcomes tied to whether the process is changing what the business does, not whether the meetings are being held. Defined before execution, reviewed against reality.
Execution support. PDL doesn't hand off a process design and walk away. The first few cycles are part of the engagement, because that's where SIOP processes either take hold or quietly break.
What the deliverables look like:
SIOP deliverable coming soon. We use synthetic data based on real experience to generate this interactive sample of work showing the current state.
Want to see the whole set of deliverables?
Unfortunately, mobile optimization isn’t always straightforward, so pdf’s are available here.