The power of continuous, touchless planning in a massively disrupted world

On one hand, disruption to the supply-value network has significantly impacted the organization’s ability to source, produce, and transport goods. At the same time, demand for groceries, personal care items, and other household essentials continues to rise. Through it all, consumer expectations for speed, customization, and availability across channels remains high.

While most organizations must address these issues with existing systems and tools, the current environment makes it clear that brands must reengineer key aspects of the supply-value network – planning chief among them – to improve resiliency, responsiveness, and agility in the long-term. Continuous, touchless planning, a self-governing, self-optimizing process that leverages intelligent-automation applications and big data to increase the speed at which plans are created, reviewed, and adapted in response to real-time changes in demand and supply, is one way that organizations can enable growth, optimize operations, and improve service, while reducing costs and working capital.

While a continuous, touchless planning capability cannot be built overnight, it is an important consideration for the future of every consumer-products organization. Our recent whitepaper, Continuous, touchless planning: How consumer-products organizations can enable a modern supply-value network through next-generation demand and supply-planning capabilities, provides an overview of the benefits and outcomes of this capability, as well as practical steps for starting the journey.