No Touch Planning: Human Error and Supply Chains

Remember that planning means predicting, forecasting and analyzing risk in context

The route to no-touch planning: Taking the human error out of supply-chain planning

Slow, manual supply-chain planning processes can be a thing of the past, with machines taking on repetitive tasks that aren’t a good use of human capacity.

The route to no-touch planning: Taking the human error out of supply-chain planning
By Ignacio Felix, Christoph Kuntze, Ildefonso Silva, and Eduardo Tobias Benoliel  in McKinsey

Slow, manual supply-chain planning processes can be a thing of the past, with machines taking on repetitive tasks that aren’t a good use of human capacity.

Supply-chain planning keeps getting harder and more time-consuming, with the consumer goods sector as one of the most extreme examples. The causes are familiar: Online retailing’s endless shelf encourages consumers to be ever more demanding, yielding product portfolios that are ever more complex and lifecycles that are ever shorter. Retailers continue to increase their service and delivery requirements, with stiff financial penalties for non-compliance. On the flip side, more and more real-time data are becoming available, with automation technology rapidly getting cheaper, more capable, and easier to implement—raising the competitive bar for the entire sector.

Traditional planning processes and tools weren’t designed either to take advantage of technology’s advances or to address the demands it creates. By and large, planning still relies heavily on labor-intensive data aggregation and cleaning, manual analysis, and personal judgment. Worse, with more customer and consumer demand signals now available instantaneously, planners often feel compelled to keep tweaking their plans, despite the weaknesses of existing planning systems and processes. Well-intentioned adjustments end up creating more problems than they solve, introducing even more errors and subconscious bias that can increase costs and exacerbate service disruptions. .... "