Planner: One of the challenges with demand planning in general is getting a business to understand the benefit of it. Some industries don’t quite see it. Coming into the company I’m at now, they didn’t have this position before. They used the forecast as inventory control. Moving away from that has been the challenge.

Sujit: There’s that, and there’s a second thing on top of it. Companies will give you a nice pat on the back for a good job done at firefighting. They don’t necessarily do the same for a good job done at planning, and you could argue that promotes the wrong behavior. I’ve always felt there is a vitamin mindset and a painkiller mindset. Planning is the vitamin. Everyone agrees it’s important, and it’s never urgent. Firefighting is urgent, and it’s important too. So it wins.

Planner: We live that as demand planners all the time.

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Sujit: I’m imagining there is some kind of monthly management review, an S&OP type of meeting, where these things get worked out.

Planner: We tried S&OP meetings here. They haven’t been successful.

Sujit: Let me offer a few reasons from my own history, and you tell me where you land. Sometimes there’s so much money to be made that getting the executives together to plan feels burdensome. Sometimes the complexity is high enough that people feel threatened by it. And sometimes it’s simply that this is how we have always done it. We have a twenty-year history of never doing S&OP, so why start now? We are a successful company.

Planner: For us, it’s not understanding the importance of it. And some of that last one. Even when we were trying to run them, the executives weren’t really involved. My team would meet with the sales executives. We would tell them what was happening and ask how they were planning to close the gap, and what we could do to help. They didn’t know how to answer that question.

Sujit: So the meeting asked them for something they didn’t have.

Planner: That’s how it felt. They still saw the forecast as an inventory tool. We want more, we want less, pull it down, add it. Not necessarily because we’re planning to sell more of it; they just want more inventory, or they want less. That’s the part I keep working on. Don’t tell me you want inventory. Tell me what you are going to sell. What is your customer looking for?

Sujit: And closing the distance between those two questions is the entire job.

Planner: It is. I think it comes down to knowledge, and getting people to understand that this matters.

Sujit: Without the monthly forum, where does the coordination actually happen now?

Planner: Weekly reviews with product management, purchasing, and the inventory team. We discuss specific SKUs within product groups. That’s where we do the work of combining items, getting rid of items, and moving demand around. We aren’t looking at the whole picture in those meetings. We aren’t covering the business end-to-end. But it’s focused, and decisions come out of it.

Sujit: Smaller room, narrower agenda, more often.

Planner: And everyone involved can act on what is discussed.

Sujit: Which is worth naming for anyone whose own attempt has stalled. A forum works when the people in the room can act on what is put in front of them.

Planner: That’s what we have now. It’s smaller than what we set out to build, and it moves.