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Planning platform selection & business case | Highlights

Highlights of real, practical experience from multiple discussions with supply chain practitioners from companies including:

2 Sisters Good Group, 3M, AB Sugar, AB-InBev, Abcam, adidas, AG Barr, Aggregate Industries, AkzoNobel, Aldi, Alexander Dennis, Alstom, Amcor, Amscan, Animalcare Group, AO, Apple, Arla Foods, Arysta, Asahi UK, Asics, AS Watson, ASR Group, Associated British Foods, Aston Martin, Astrak Group, Astrazeneca, Atlas Copco, Avon, Bacardi, Bakkavor, Balt Extrusion, BAT, Bausch Health, Bavaria Breweries, Beiersdorf, Belron, Berkeley Group, BMI Healthcare, Boots, BP, Bridgestone, Bristol Myers Squibb, Brita, British Sugar, Britvic, Brooks Running, BT, Bugaboo, Burberry, Burton's Biscuit Company, C&C Group, Campari, Cantel Medical, Cargill, Carlsberg, Caterpillar, Cath Kidston, Centrica, Chartlotte Tilbury, Clariant, Clarks, cmostores.com, Coca-Cola, Colorcon, Corbion, Costa Coffee, Coty, Cra'ster, Currys, Danone, Dawn Foods, Deckers, DFS, Diageo, Dr Oetker, Dreambaby, DS Smith, Dunelm, easyJet, Electrolux, Energizer, Euro Car Parts, Eurofit Group, Fairphone, Ferrero, Flo Gas, Ford, Freesat, Furniture Village, General Mills, Glory Global, Goodyear, Google, Greencore, Greggs, GRS, GSK, Hachette, Haleon, Halfords, Hallmark, Haribo, HARMAN, Hasbro, Heineken, Henkel, Hilti Corporation, Howdens, HP, HTC Europe, IBM, JCB, JDE, Jewson, John Lewis, Johnson + Johnson, Kao Corporation, Karcher, Kerry, Kimberly-Clark, KIND Snacks, Kingfisher, KP, KraftHeinz, Lactalis, LEGO, Leoni, Lululemon, LVMH, M&Co, Macmillan Education, Majestic Wine, Marks & Spencer, Mars-Wrigley, McCormick, McDonalds, Medtronic, Mondelēz, Monica Vinader, Moove Lubricants, Monsanto, Morrisons, Mountain Warehouse, Müller, Nando's, Nestlé, Nike, Novocure, Nutricia, O-I, Opple, Oriflame, Oxford University Press, Pearson, Pentland, PEP&CO, Pepsico, Pernod Ricard, Perrigo, Pfizer, Philip Morris, Philips, Pladis Global, Primark, PZ Cussons, Reckitt, Red Bull, Ricoh, River Island, RS Group, Sainsbury's, SC Johnson, Shell, Siemens Healthineers, Sky, Smith & Nephew, Sodastream, Sony, Specsavers, STADA, Starbucks, STMicro, Suntory, Superdry, Takeda, TalkTalk, Tata Consumer Goods, Tate & Lyle, Tesco, Teva, The Body Shop, The Nature's Bounty Co., ThermoFisher, The Very Group, TJX Europe, Topps Tiles, TT Electronics, Tupperware, Under Armour, Unilever, Upfield, Vision Engineering, Vivera, Vodafone, Waitrose, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Warburtons, WD-40, Westcoast, Whitworths, WHSmith, William Grant, Wickes and WLI.

How to quantify the business case?
Key points from members' experience include:
  • This can be difficult to articulate in purely financial terms, especially if different business units have different operating models, market conditions and maturity levels. Available literature about asset savings potential depends a lot on current baselines and conditions;
  • Vendor templates that claim to quantify RoI can be based on questionable assumptions
  • According to Gartner, the expected improvements will vary between companies but typical metrics used in business cased and the expected impact of technology investments are:
    • Forecast accuracy: 10-15%
    • Inventory reduction: 10-30%
    • Inventory turns: 15-30%
    • On-Time in Full: 5-10%
    • Transportation Spend: 5-10%
    • Planner Productivity: 10-60%
    • Decision-Making Speed: 30-50%
  • Typically, SCDs needed to make the case for SC investments at two levels – first the executive team and then, if corporate governance requires it, the board. An effective business management process such as IBP was the main platform which consolidated the product, demand, supply chain and financial plans for the business in preparation for senior meetings where the plan’s business decisions were taken.  This process helped establish that investment is essential for the delivery of the plan as signed off by all functions, making a clear case to the executive team with all the detail it needed to present the investment to the board for approval.
  • Without such a process, it was generally more of a challenge to clearly explain the business deliverables of the investment and show the linkage to the business strategy. A key enabler was to work with the finance team to develop the return on investment and build out the business case with the broader non-financial deliverables of the investment.
  • As more members implement planning platforms, we are running 'lessons learned' discussions sessions​ based on different applications of mainstream and less well-known platforms.

Related content
How to win stakeholder buy-in?
Key points from members' experience include:
  • Create a compelling story so that all stakeholders recognise the value of a technology investment? This does not always have to be quantifiable and can often leverage a recent problem or missed opportunity which is widely recognised as having been avoidable
  • Identify champions
    • people who have seen IBP work in previous roles
    • focus on one business unit with the most desire to change
  • What are the most broadly recognised tangible benefits?
    • inventory visibility & insight on ordering decision processes
    • scenario planning for high impact or time-sensitive decisions, without using spreadsheets
  • Make the selection process transparent. Though it’s vital to get the buy-in of supply chain professionals, shifting the mindset of the wider business through effective change management is central to success. Overall, transforming an organisational mentality is about taking every employee on a journey; communicating the individual value of the changes for them, as well as what it means for the business going forwards. Great technology is only as good as the people using it. If employees aren’t convinced that new solutions will benefit them or their roles, siloed thinking and use of traditional tools such as Excel will continue, even if there are better technologies available
  • Dashboards and simplified visualisation are helpful to buy-in and consensus


How to shortlist platform vendors?
  • Key points from members' experience include:
    • It is common for those considering investment into planning platforms to start with the Gartner Magic Quadrant to shortlist potential vendors. It is also quite intuitive to focus on the top right ‘Leaders’ box and guess that it might be safer to shortlist from among those options as choosing a Challenger, Visionary or Niche Player might require additional justification and, therefore, carry higher reputational risk.
    • However, the Magic Quadrant focuses on the vendor, not the product or its capabilities. As of April 2022, there were 22 vendors listed although we are familiar with many more vendors who either have their own technology platform or provide a specialised implementation service for one or more technology platforms as the main contracting party. 
    • Focus on critical capabilities by maturity level:
      • 1: Limited process integration within supply chain functions (e.g. planning, warehousing, distribution)
      • 2: Established process integration within supply chain functions
      • 3: Cross-functional process integration beyond supply chain (e.g. including commercial, finance, production & procurement)
      • 4: External collaboration with Tier 1 partners (i.e. suppliers and customers)
      • 5: End-to-end / multi-tier external collaboration 
  • Depending on your industry context, operating model and business strategy objectives, it may be worthwhile to consider which planning horizons are most important and focus on platform capabilities that will have the greatest impact on them

  • Resilience is now a core component of digitalisation roadmaps so how is that defined for your business? The goal should be for the tool to help planning better orchestrate the end-to-end supply chain…not just make the forecast more accurate

  • Consider the 4 dimensions of people, process, data and systems when you are defining priorities and forming your roadmap; capabilities need to be developed in all 4 dimensions to achieve best outcomes. In particular, the people dimension is absolutely critical so be prepared to rethink what the ‘planner of the future’ looks like

    • Other key selection criteria
      • Cost & pricing model
      • Ease of integration with ERP / other data sources
      • User interface (UI) / adoption
      • Time & effort to implement
      • Flexibility / customisability
      • Scalability 
      • Extensibility / modularity
      • Future-proofed / ongoing research investment in the underlying technology
  • Planning platforms can be categorised into four different types:
    • Dedicated: fully focused and designed for supply chain optimisation
    • Flexible: platforms that are able to support planning but are more flexible in terms of their design and configuration
    • Integrated ERP: most ERP systems have planning modules which may not match dedicated platforms for capability or be as flexible but usually (but not always) should be easier to implement as they require less data cleansing and integration work
    • Off-the-shelf: offer little or no customisation and typically less capability than dedicated platforms but, if data is available, are faster to implement at lower cost
  • Choosing the right one:
    • insist on demos using real data and don’t underestimate the time needed to work on data challenges: poor data integration between platforms can seriously undermine the effectiveness of platform
    • time and materials or fixed cost? If requirements are clear, tend towards fixed cost
    • get the statement of work as granular as you can but keep the focus on business requirements, not legal technicalities

Lessons learned from recent implementations?
Key points from members' experience include:
  • Be prepared for an iterative process at first where the planning system informs and influences the planning processes before establishing template end-to-end processes that can be rolled out to other business units
  • It pays to have a clear PMO structure and different main roles with ‘super users’ training the trainers, data scientists improving the algorithms and innovative approaches and the planning analysts who run the routines, identify and handle the exceptions and outliers
  • For those with experience of ‘next-gen’ tools, there has clearly been an improvement in forecasting capability, not least as a collaborative platform where commercial and planning can come together to enrich the forecast although there is still a role for more traditional, univariate statistical models to play, particularly for some demand profiles
  • Business units who already had a good grasp of price and promo data have seen much bigger improvements than those without demand driver intelligence
  • ‘Next-gen’ platforms have certainly helped improve and embed best practice planning processes but leadership is critical to that and, also, the perception of it being a business / IBP process and not just a ‘supply chain thing’

How to fast-track vendor discovery?
  • We've heard from many members how there just isn't time in the day to do due diligence on each and every potential platform provider that probably should be considered. That's why, in practice, many tend to focus on the Gartner Magic Quadrant which only covers about a quarter of the vendor market and tends to be skewed towards the more expensive, dedicated planning platforms
  • Start by conducting a capability and maturity audit to determine which type of platform is likely to be the best fit (off-the-shelf, ERP-based, flexible or dedicated)
  • Once you have a clearer idea about the capabilities and kind of platform you need, we run group showcase discussion sessions with relevant providers which fast-track the process by:
    • identifying potential vendors that you may not have considered which, at the very least, will further your grasp on their relative strengths and weaknesses
    • saving you the time and trouble of fielding sales calls and setting up multiple appointments
    • managing the preparation and delivery of each session so that it addresses your specific needs and questions, above and beyond the standard feature pitch
    • grouping together participants from similar but non-competitive businesses so each can benefit from questions and insights that might otherwise be missed

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