- Where does ‘Planning’ Start and End in Your Enterprise?
- Do you have a ‘Digital’ strategy for transforming your planning functions? Do you have the needed use cases, howsoever vague? What transformation are you really desiring? What ‘Big Data’ are you currently staging and using to better your demand and supply plans? Do you even have a basic architecture to get this data and integrate with your planning processes?
- How (de) centralized is your demand and supply planning team? Who else participates in your planning ‘ritual’ and how? Do they have the needed tools for real time collaboration on the move? What do you call your planning processes? Monthly ‘Sales’ Planning, S&OP, IBP, Demand Planning, Operational Planning? Is your planning designed to penalize the collaborators or provide them the needed intelligence?
- Are you able to view, analyse and plan demand along the needed dimensions and segments? Are your products and customers segmented and clustered in any meaningful way?
- What about planning for After Market Demand? Do you have Predictive Models for estimating the demand for a replacement part? Does your existing software offer such models?
- Does your ‘Global’ CFO really need to bother your monthly SKU forecasts? What the heck are they planning differently from your demand and supply planners?
- Do you plan to sell more of what you do not have or plan to increase your market share? or revenue? or better your profitability? How profitable is your forecast? Do you measure it?
- Do you have any visibility into your promotions effectiveness? How do you measure the elasticity of demand wrt a particular promotion? What about New products?
- What really is the cost of your lost sales? Do you quantify the cost of your forecast error? Do you really need to bother those few cents you may be losing by not producing what the customer wanted?
- Are your forecasts adding up to the business targets announced at last ‘annual sales meet’?
- Are your demand and supply plans validated against available capacity? Do you really know your maximum usable capacity?
- How frequently should you plan? How far in the future should you plan? Can you fully automate your planning? Ever? What signals should trigger re-planning? How reactive is your planning?
- What external intelligence / leading indicators do you have to make your planning more forward looking? Do these determinants have a linear or non-linear impact on demand / revenue?
- Are you growing in a growing market? Or slowing down faster than competition in periods of general slump. Do you know what your competition is planning to eat into your market share?
Planning functions have varying motivations in various firms. Find out how you can significantly improve your Business Planning activities by building planning organizations that deliver. Learn how to design, measure, communicate and translate those plans to meet your customer demand and beat competition.
