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Is our Demand Planning agile enough?
When I discuss agility with various Supply Chain teams, their initiatives are usually centred around supply side agility. They want to improve the flexibility and responsiveness of procurement, production and distribution functions.
Is it enough?
Supply Chains extend from vendors of input materials to consumers of finished goods. If we want to improve supply chain agility, we should look at the whole system from vendors to consumers. Making just the supplies more agile is like optimising only a sub-system, not the whole system.
Demand Planning is an essential and critical part of the overall system. Why should we ignore it in our agility initiatives?
Systems Thinking tells us that agility of the overall supply chain will be constrained by the agility of Demand Planning, if it is the least agile sub-system.
Demand Planning can indeed by made more agile through the principles, concepts and practices of Demand Sensing.
More on it in subsequent posts…