That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains. ~Steve Jobs
Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. ~Isaac Newton
At all levels of the organization, in order to be agile and effective you MUST find a way to make your processes SIMPLE.
When planning a particular item or product line, what is the simplest path from forecast to execution? In order to solve service challenges, inventory obsolescence, increasing turns, raw material availability, and so forth how many people have to get together for any given item to identify gaps?
When presenting a forecast, is your CEO concerned with the forecast of each individual SKU? Does each plant manager need the details on each customer taking the item from distribution?
Planners exist to simplify the complexity of your business. They present to leadership the high level plan and the gaps that exist so meaningful decisions can be made. They take an incredibly complex business and provide a plan at a level that's meaningful to CFO, Production Supervisor, and Materials Buyer who each have different requirements.
If you're planning team is not taking the complex and making it simple for other areas to make decisions then it's not being done correctly. Your teams need quick access to their KPIs, alerts to outliers occurring, and to be spending their time simplifying the everyday activities taking place in the rest of the business.
If this isn't how planning feels in your organization, contact us today. Let's get it right!