As we head to the end of 2024, it’s good time to revisit a key approach to better planning.
Plan in a holistic environment.
In most organizations, planning happens in disconnected siloes. Finance owns the master corporate financial plan and functional leaders own their operational plans. Nobody has visibility over the whole, because the planning process typically happens in spreadsheets or, sometimes, in department-specific point-solution tools.
Both present challenges to demand planning. Spreadsheets are error-prone, retrospective, and time-consuming—limiting the ability for operational leaders to plan effectively and burdening finance with endless wrangling and reconciliation that leaves little time for analysis. In practice, building the holistic vision demand planning requires is nearly impossible using spreadsheets. And even if you manage it, it’s far too slow given how fast demand can change.
Equally, department-specific planning tools might empower operational leaders to plan more easily within their own department than with spreadsheets, but they don’t integrate with other departments and finance has little oversight. This lack of connectedness doesn’t just forfeit possible cross-department collaboration opportunities—it means it’s difficult to build that holistic planning vision.
To transform demand planning, you need a holistic planning environment that ingests and automatically reconciles data from multiple sources, both across the business and, ideally, externally. By feeding planning systems with real-time data—such as from ERP and CRM systems—organizations are better equipped to forecast demand for goods and services, including anticipating regional spikes or slumps and adjusting sales territories, informing marketing campaigns, tailoring goals, and assessing performance accordingly.
Rally broad participation.
Demand planning isn’t one single functional area but a subset of financial planning that benefits from the input of operational department leaders and impacts operational departments downstream.
For example, say you’re planning demand for a manufacturer and marketing is about to run a campaign for a particular product in a certain region. You need visibility into marketing’s planned activities to predict demand spikes, which in turn have a downstream impact as you need to ensure you’ve got enough supply and enough headcount to fulfill orders. You might need to optimize warehouse space, or reroute resources from other product lines. You need to know how logistics is functioning on the ground, and manage customer delivery expectations accordingly. And all of this will impact your revenue targets and cash flow.
The point is, demand planning is a deeply collaborative activity that’s usually orchestrated by finance but impacts the entire business. Ultimately, as confidence and capability grows, dispersed operational leaders should autonomously feed into the process with their own data and act on insights.
To get there, you’ll need a high level of collaboration across the enterprise. That means you need a planning tool that not only creates a single holistic environment, but one that’s also designed with business users in mind.
The right tool needs to feel intuitive in the hands of dispersed functional leaders, or else adoption will suffer.
Recalibrate and synchronize plans continually.
As we’ve said, distributed demand plans are connected—they continually change, and are changed by, plans from other departments. Demand is seldom fixed—it can shift in the moments it takes for an influencer to tweet the wrong thing, or for a competitor to suddenly gain traction, or a legal body to confirm a regulatory change.
Plans that are continuously synchronized ensure crucial operational decisions are based on real-time data, not outdated information and best guesses. In practice, this is a large, impractical, and error-prone task to undertake manually.
Imagine the end-game here. Demand planning is just one planning category that happens across the company, constantly. Operational decision-makers across the business autonomously and continually input and tweak data to enable better everyday decision-making. But every tweak, nuance, or new piece of information can have an impact on demand planning and needs reconciling with the demand plan and the overarching corporate financial plan.
To achieve this vision—of a self-orchestrating plan of plans—you need a platform with an architecture that empowers leaders across departments to plan within their own instance while automatically synchronizing updates across other related plans. The more closely plans are synchronized, the more warning you have and the better you can prepare for changes in demand.
Build strong relationships to galvanize buy-in.
Demand planning, like company-wide planning as a whole, represents a major shift from traditional planning methods. Rather than being an activity owned by finance, demand planning enlists input from departments across the organization.
As with any change initiative, building momentum can be difficult. You might encounter initial skepticism from operational leaders, especially if planning and collaborating with finance has traditionally been challenging.
Don’t underestimate the gravitational pull of inertia, either. Old habits die hard—particularly given that the limitations of your current approach will be invisible to most operational leaders. Finance’s first job is to prove that a better way exists at all—and that this way tangibly improves the day-to-day tasks of operational leaders and supports high-level corporate goals.
Persistence is key to company-wide planning. Stay with it and enjoy the fruits of your labor!
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