What is CD&OP?
Clinical Demand & Operations Planning (CD&OP) is a structured monthly planning process in which clinical operations and clinical supply chain teams align on one shared demand forecast and supply plan for each trial. It adapts Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), the standard planning cadence in commercial supply chains, to the specifics of clinical trials: uncertain patient enrollment, protocol amendments, and investigational product with limited shelf life.
In a typical CD&OP cycle, the team reviews actual patient enrollment and site activations against the prior forecast, updates enrollment and dispensing assumptions, regenerates the demand forecast, and translates it into a supply plan — production, packaging, and depot-level deployment — before committing to the next month's decisions.
The value of the process comes from its cadence and its single source of truth. When clinical operations and supply chain each maintain their own spreadsheets, disagreements about assumptions surface late, usually as a supply problem. A monthly CD&OP cycle forces those assumptions into the open on a fixed schedule, while there is still time to act on them.
CD&OP is distinct from the systems that execute the plan. An IRT/RTSM system randomizes patients and triggers resupply shipments during the trial; CD&OP is the forward-looking process that decides how much drug to make and where to position it in the first place.
How TrialSupply handles this
TrialSupply is built around the monthly CD&OP cadence. Demand forecasts recalculate automatically when enrollment assumptions change, forecast snapshots preserve what the plan looked like at each cycle so teams can measure forecast accuracy over time, and planning books translate the agreed demand forecast into a supply plan in the same system — so clinical and supply teams work from one set of numbers.