Walking into S&OP knowing exactly what fed the number
Arjun — Supply Chain Analytics Team LeaderHigh-tech manufacturing (precision electronics)
Arjun tried the Explorer trial himself during a rough S&OP cycle, saw it work, and bought a Team plan on his own cost-center budget. IT was looped in afterward for a security review. That was this organisation’s call about a metadata-only tool, not a rule — your own review requirements still apply.
What tipped them over
The month it tipped, a plant manager asked where the inventory target came from, and Arjun realized the honest answer was scattered across three analysts, a Snowflake query nobody could immediately find, and an Excel model with a tab labeled "final_v4." The number was right. He just couldn't prove it in the room.
For years the work had felt like a carpenter carrying his tools across the job site in both arms, dropping the important ones somewhere between the truck and the wall, then walking back to look for them. MyDataWork was the toolbox he could actually carry to the job. Same tools, same SQL and Excel and Tableau, but now they had a place, a name, and an owner.
The first problem they solved
He started small in Explorer over a weekend, cataloging the queries, workbooks and dashboards behind one S&OP deliverable and linking them to use cases, recorded value and stakeholders. He followed his organization’s approval and information-handling rules before connecting work; metadata and authored context can still contain sensitive information.
The lesson came fast: he'd assumed his analysts knew who owned what. Mapping the lineage showed two dashboards quietly depending on a supplier extract that one analyst maintained by hand and had never documented. Fixing that before it broke mid-cycle was worth the whole exercise.
For the first time I walked into S&OP able to point at exactly which files, queries, and owners fed the plan, and I didn't flinch.
Scaling from here
Arjun bought the Team plan through his cost center, following his organization’s purchasing process. The Architecture & Value rollup helped him see where recorded value and dependencies concentrated. His analysts controlled sharing with ordinary members, while authorized workspace administrators could inspect individual member records through the audited Workspace view. That visibility covers workspace metadata and authored context, not access to the underlying source files.
When IT came in later for the security review, the conversation was easy. He wasn't asking them to own a tool. He was showing them one his team already ran.
Toward agentic & generative AI
Getting AI-ready turned out to be the natural next rung. With the estate cataloged and lineage mapped, Arjun had a foundation of metadata and work context for an assistant, subject to access controls and human review. He scoped an "S&OP prep" assistant in Agent Studio first, defining what it should pull together before every cycle, rather than building blind and hoping.
Then he used Agent Access to give an approved planning copilot read-only access to selected metadata and authored context, so it could see how assets connected without receiving source files or underlying business-data rows. The team stayed in control of what was exposed, and Arjun could explain, to the VP and to IT, precisely where the line was.
