"He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass." – Ray Dalio
Traditional supply chain planning techniques have failed. Companies are too slow to react to changes, and collaboration across silos and continuous learning options limited. We need a new approach to planning, to know sooner and act faster. Concurrent planning provides this ability to continuously and simultaneously plan, monitor and respond to changes in one single environment. It is the ability to sense and respond in near real-time, to take rational decisions, across multiple teams and departments, with competing objectives, to feel and react, backed by the emotions from the market. Concurrent planning is actually how our brain works, combining the highly analytical and structured right side to organize and decide, and the purely intuitive, emotional and collaborative skills from the creative artistic left brain side, to imagine and envision. Both processes happen simultaneously and synchronously in the brain, without too many delays, allowing rapid responses to new events. Making companies adopt this new planning technique, and educate companies to operate as one single brain, could be highly disruptive.
The benefits of concurrent planning
Below are the 5 unparalleled benefits, this new planning technique promises to companies, adopting this powerful new capability:
1. Always on. No batch jobs. No downtime. No delay to capture a change in demand, production, inventory or capacity constraint, before taking a decision.
"The brain is the most outstanding organ. It works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year from birth, until you fall in love." – Sophie Monroe, Afflicted
2. Real-time score keeping.
Business is like a team sport. We all need the scorecard in front of us displaying current, and projecting future results.
"If winning weren't important, nobody would keep score." – Al McGuire
3. Imagining the future through simulation.
A company consists of lots of individuals. Anyone among them can come up with an idea, to solve a common problem with the need to test the hypotheses, validate results and then share the potential outcomes with the others Concurrent planning offers multiple parallel environments to carry out rapid what-if analysis and scenario comparison, across multiple functions, to make the best possible collective analysis about the future, in terms of alternatives and impact. Collaboration and scenario-building are extremely powerful to address problems. Most of the time, a connected and collaborative multi-disciplinary team will find the better solutions, faster than the individual thinker.
"Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists. With it all things are possible." – Ida Tarbell
4. Connecting the dots with a single data model.
Did you know that today lack of information is the number one barrier to wealth? Without access to the right data, it is impossible to orchestrate business activities and coordinate course corrections, that optimize overall corporate performance and profitability. Planners need access to ALL data, past, present and future, structured or unstructured, current, past and future plans, from all over the extended supply chain network, as seen in every department, so they can plan the entire network in one single sweep, covering demand, supply, capacity and inventory.
"It is a capital mistake to theorize, before one has the data." – Sir Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
5. Decide and execute before the world has changed.
Supply chain model representations take a lot of details to fully grasp the richness of your business, and solvers trying to fully predict the best path ahead traditionally suffer from serious run-times. With broader data about your value network, faster specialized analytics, specific to your industry, and planners leveraging very rich online and immediate simulation capabilities, concurrent planning can provide you these answers, in seconds or minutes, and before your decision will have become obsolete. This is the ultimate promise of concurrent planning, trading-off over analysis and corporate paralysis, for speed and agility.
"Planning is bringing the future into the present, so you can do something about it now." – Alan Lakein
Additional Resources
- Concurrent planning frequently asked questions
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