Last week, with several feet of snow out my window, I had some fun trying to visualize sales and operations planning (S&OP). I came up with this word cloud.

A word cloud is a graphical representation of the occurrence of words on a web site or in a document. The more prevalent the word is in a document the more prominent it displays in the graphic. Some people see little value in these graphics but I believe there is some insight to gain.

For my word cloud I chose to use one of Lora Cecere’s recent, and comprehensive, S&OP reports, The Supply Chain Shaman’s Journal: A Focused Look at Sales and Operations Planning. The idea is to identify which words are closely related, relevant and impact S&OP in the mind of an industry expert.