​​Contents

Planning digitalisation - big picture challenges

Use cases

Adoption barriers

Selecting a planning tool

Top recommendations from participants' experience

Key considerations

Securing budget

With thanks to participants from...

See also...

• Digest: Volatility, Agility & Resilience: Next-Level Planning
• Digest: Supply Chain Design & Scenario Modelling

• The belief that AI technology is generally not mature enough yet for plug & play. In reality, it has been a mixed experience whereby some default options have been a good fit whereas some big-name products needed lots of rework;
• IT departments can be territorial about master data and often have a bias towards building in-house capability but this can make it less accessible and user friendly if not designed with a clear understanding of the end goals;
• As ever, building confidence in initiatives and getting over fear factor which sometimes needed a leap of faith and trust in the algorithm before trying to unpack There were few overnight successes and the vast majority certainly required time & effort;
• Another fear factor was that ML/AI is going to kill jobs which created passive (and, in some cases, active!) resistance. It’s vital to work with HR to clarify the intended use and impact of ML/AI and make clear it’s about augmenting people’s roles not replacing them;
• Too much and/or poor quality data: the old adage about garbage in, garbage out still holds true and even the best algorithms and models will perform poorly with low quality data. A substantial about of human input is required to guide & define this process;
• More than ever, demonstrating business cases and ROI at a time when investment capital is at a premium. Especially when around 80% of current IT budgets go on maintenance of current infrastructure;
• Planning, managing & leveraging digital transformation at an industrial scale across a global business with many moving parts.

​​Top recommendations from participants' experience

• Carefully consider where you are at and your level of planning maturity. An audit of users is a great way to begin the process of properly understanding and formulating requirements;

• Process is equally, if not more, important than the tool. Do you need / are you ready for the highest level of functionality right away?; 

• 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;

• The level of vendors’ ongoing investment into their software is a key criteria as tools are likely to continue evolving at speed;

• Agree a timeframe upfront: selection should be a 12-week process (or less). Beyond that, it can run out of steam;

• Using a tool selection framework is important to structure thinking: aim to create a shortlist of max four companies; conduct a proof of concept and reference vendors by talking to other users;

• Buy-in: 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.

​​Key considerations

• Should I be looking at next generation systems with out-of-the-box machine learning AI capability?;
• Single vs. multiple tools? How advantageous is it to use a single vendor?;
• Make or buy? In specific contexts with particular requirements, developing in-house capability may pay off. Bear in mind that some tools offer a ‘best of both worlds’ with, for example, out-of-the-box algorithms for the majority of machine learning demands but also capability for customisation within the same tool;
• Usability: if you have an in-house or particularly complex tool and your superusers move on, you could have a major problem;
• Getting right tools for job: job needs to drive tool, not other way around;
• Too many tools, not enough integration can cause organisations to act in silos;
• Transition into various tools: supply chain-centred but accessible to other functions;
• Dashboards and simplified visualisation are helpful to buy-in and consensus;
• Can the tool choose the right forecasting model?

​​Securing budget

Establishing robust business cases, winning senior management as well as stakeholder buy-in and, finally, securing the budget for new investments are among the mostly hotly debated topics of all.

Supply chain professionals generally tend to appreciate the scale and nature of the transformation at hand, but how should this be best communicated at board level, particularly when there might not be many / any members with a supply chain background?

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 (sometimes referred to as advanced S&OP) 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.

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​​With thanks to participants from...