A conversation with Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid Group and author of Value Centric
Executive Summary
Most S&OP and IBP processes were built for a stable world that no longer exists. Dov Shenkman, CEO of Atid Group and author of the newly published Value Centric, argues that the discipline these processes bring is real, but it is too often aimed at the wrong target. Organisations become brilliant at coordinating sales and operations around efficiency, forecast accuracy and monthly numbers, while the question that actually determines whether a business thrives, how value is created for the customer and captured for the business, sits outside the process altogether.
In this conversation, Dov and Mark trace the evolution from S&OP to IBP, introduce the Customer-Business Value Matrix as a practical tool for segmenting customers by value rather than size, and explore how AI is set to close the long-standing gap between planning and execution. The throughline is a simple but demanding idea: profit is not the goal. It is a result.
Core Insights
Efficiency-focused S&OP and IBP processes reinforce a downward spiral rather than reversing it, because they optimise coordination without questioning what is being coordinated towards.
Value, not revenue or forecast accuracy, should be the trade-off currency that resolves conflict between sales and operations.
The Customer-Business Value Matrix segments customers into value partners, retention risks, margin diluters and value destroyers, and gives leaders a structured way to have the hardest conversation in the business.
AI’s role in S&OP and IBP is not primarily about cost reduction. It is about closing the gap between the plan and its execution, the same gap that separates a paper map from a self-driving car.
Roughly 90% of the transformations in Dov’s career were reactive. Proactive transformation means asking what your value is today, before the market forces the question.
Brilliant Execution of the Wrong Things
S&OP emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a way of bridging sales and operations, each function optimising against its own KPIs, with little coordination between them. It worked well because the world it was designed for was relatively stable. Oliver Wight extended the methodology into Integrated Business Planning by adding a strategic layer, the product portfolio, and connecting demand, supply, financial and management review into a single monthly cycle.
The problem, as Dov sees it, is that both S&OP and IBP inherited the same underlying goal from that stable era: efficiency. And efficiency, pursued as the primary objective, has a way of reinforcing itself. Organisations get better and better at running the same race, without asking whether it is the race worth running.
“That’s the premise of executing the wrong thing brilliantly. Because if you focus only on efficiency, in a way you play in the Red Ocean, given the Blue Ocean and Red Ocean theory. And that’s a downward spiral.” — Dov Shenkman
The Red Ocean, in Blue Ocean strategy terms, is the crowded, competitive space where companies fight over existing demand by getting incrementally more efficient. The Blue Ocean is uncontested space created by redefining value altogether. Dov’s argument is that most planning processes are structurally built to keep organisations swimming in the Red Ocean, however well they are run.
Profit Is a Result, Not a Goal
Dov’s reframe is deceptively simple. Profit, in his view, is not the objective an organisation should be managing towards. It is the outcome of a healthier equation, the value delivered to the customer, set against what the customer is willing to pay, set against the cost of delivering it.
“My premise is that profit is not the goal. Profit is a result. And profit is the result between the value that you deliver to your customer, given what they’re willing to pay for your value, and the cost that it takes you to generate that value.” — Dov Shenkman
This is not an argument against efficiency. Cross-functional coordination and cost discipline remain essential. But when they become the only lens through which a planning process is run, the conversation drifts from value discovery towards bureaucratic reporting, and the CEO, in Dov’s experience, starts finding reasons not to attend.
Mark’s own example from the conversation illustrates the point well. A supplier tracking OTIF, on time in full, typically measures the moment product leaves the factory gate, not when it arrives with the customer. Worse, it treats every customer’s definition of good service as identical, when one customer values low cost and bulk delivery while another values just-in-time precision. A single efficiency metric, applied uniformly, can be technically excellent and commercially meaningless at the same time.
The Customer-Business Value Matrix
To make value tangible rather than aspirational, Dov uses a simple two-by-two matrix, plotting the value a customer receives against the value the business receives in return.
Value Partners — high value to the customer, high value to the business. The goal is to understand what makes these relationships work and replicate it.
Retention Risks — the business profits, but the customer isn’t getting enough in return. These are the customers a competitor can win with comparatively little effort.
Margin Diluters — the customer is delighted, the business is not. The task is to find more efficient ways to serve them, or to convert the relationship.
Value Destroyers — neither side is realising value. Nobody quite knows why the relationship persists, and it usually persists because revenue, not value, is the metric in view.
“One morning you will wake up and you will see the suitcases close to the door, and the customer will say goodbye.” — Dov Shenkman, on the fragility of switching-cost retention
The value destroyer quadrant is, in Dov’s view, the most important and the most avoided. Businesses tend to keep unprofitable, low-value relationships alive because they cover fixed costs, even as they consume resources that could be redirected towards value partners. Identifying them requires the kind of courage that a revenue-first culture rarely rewards.
From Paper Maps to Self-Driving Cars
Dov’s clearest explanation of where AI fits into this picture is also his most memorable. He describes the evolution of navigation, from paper maps, to GPS route planning, to a fully autonomous vehicle that senses, decides and adjusts in real time without waiting for the driver to interpret the instructions.
“So if you ask yourself, what is the parallel in supply chain? I think today organisations are in between the manual map and the GPS without external data.” — Dov Shenkman
Most S&OP and IBP processes, on this analogy, still rely on the individual to bridge the gap between a plan and its execution, reconciling fragmented systems, incomplete data and competing KPIs largely through personal judgement and force of argument. The organisations that close that gap, Dov argues, will look less like a driver following a GPS and more like the self-driving vehicle itself, continuously resensing and readjusting as conditions change.
Crucially, he is clear that this is not primarily a cost story. The temptation is to frame AI as a way to remove headcount from planning and execution. The more useful frame is a system that closes the loop between value discovery and value delivery on an ongoing basis, freeing leaders to spend their attention on the judgement calls that still require it.
Reactive Versus Proactive Transformation
Perhaps the most sobering moment in the conversation is Dov’s own reckoning with his career. Looking back across three decades of transformation work, he estimates that around 90% of it was reactive, triggered only once an organisation had already drifted deep into the Red Ocean and needed cost reduction to survive.
“The proactive basically ask, okay, what is my value today? And how can I reinvent my business before somebody else reinvents it for me?” — Dov Shenkman
The distinction matters because the pace of change is no longer set by the organisation. It is set by competitors and customers, and increasingly by how quickly both can be understood through the kind of unstructured data, customer complaints, order histories, competitive signals, that AI is now well suited to interpreting. Proactive organisations use that visibility to ask hard questions about their own value proposition before the market forces the answer on them. Reactive organisations wait for the revenue numbers to confirm what the leading indicators had been signalling for months.
Dov’s advice for anyone recognising their own organisation in this pattern is characteristically practical: start the journey without needing to see the destination. Value, unlike financial reporting, has no universal accounting standard. It has to be built, one honest conversation and one small step at a time.
Why This Matters for Your Organisation
For leaders responsible for S&OP, IBP or the broader integrated business planning cycle, Dov’s argument is a useful diagnostic rather than a criticism. A process can be well run, well attended and still efficiency-first by default, simply because nobody has explicitly asked it to be anything else. The Customer-Business Value Matrix offers a concrete starting point, a way of testing whether your top customers could be placed on that map today, and whether everyone in the room would agree on where they sit.
It also reframes the AI conversation many organisations are already having. The question worth asking is not only where AI can remove cost, but where it can close the gap between what your planning process decides and what actually reaches the customer as value.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Watch and listen to the full episode with Dov Shenkman on the Arkaro Insights podcast:
📺 YouTube: www.youtube.com/@arkaro
🎧 Apple Podcasts: Listen on Apple Podcasts
🎧 Spotify: Listen on Spotify
🎧 Amazon Music: Listen on Amazon Music
🎧 Buzzsprout: arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com
About Dov Shenkman
Dov Shenkman is CEO of Atid Group and the author of Value Centric: The Proven Framework for How Modern Companies Transform and Win. His career spans more than three decades leading global supply chains and operations, including major overhauls at Medtronic and Walgreens Boots Alliance. He now works with executive leadership teams on transformation, drawing on a framework built around value segmentation, the mutual value zone, and capability development.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dov-shenkman-a090162/
Book: Value Centric on Amazon
Blog: valuecentricibp.com/blog
Related Reading from the Arkaro Insights Archive
So what is the difference between S&OP and IBP? And does it matter?. The grounding piece for the terminology Mark and Dov work through in the opening minutes, including the same Oliver Wight origin story behind the shift from S&OP to IBP.
Does your S&OP or IBP process need a reboot?. The closest thematic pair to this conversation. Where Dov argues that efficiency-first planning reinforces a downward spiral, this article sets out the practical signs that a process has drifted into exactly that pattern.
Make Strategy Work: The Power of Integrated Business Planning. Explores the strategic layer Oliver Wight added when S&OP became IBP, the same evolution Dov traces before making his case that most organisations never fully arrived at it.
AI & the Octopus Organization | Stephen Wunker. Stephen makes the same distinction Dov draws in this episode, that AI’s value lies in transformation rather than cost reduction. Mark references Stephen directly in the conversation, making this a natural companion piece.
Jobs to Be Done: The Missing Link in B2B Innovation. A practical complement to the Customer-Business Value Matrix, both start from the same premise, that understanding what a customer actually values matters more than how they are conventionally segmented.
Related Episodes
Fusion Strategy: The $75 Trillion Industrial AI Opportunity | Venkat Venkatraman. Referenced directly by Mark in this conversation. Venkat’s argument that asset-heavy industries must rethink their business models for the data economy sits alongside Dov’s case for rethinking what planning processes are actually for.
AI in S&OP and IBP: From Forecasts to Decisions | Niels Van Hove. Also referenced directly by Mark, who borrows Niels’s line that a typical S&OP meeting can feel like going to the dentist. Niels’s decision-centric framing pairs naturally with Dov’s paper-map-to-self-driving-car analogy for where AI takes planning next.
