5 Ways to Encourage Demand Planners

Successful demand planners enjoy the challenge of aligning forecasts with expected demand. They like digging into data to understand what drives the variations between periods. They are good at communicating their findings to other members of the S&OP team. And they understand that the best plans are often the result of ongoing give-and-take between the different S&OP teams.

The demand planner role can also be incredibly stressful. Planners work at the intersection of all the data, expectations, and goals of all the other S&OP members. They are constantly asked to balance the requirements of sales, finance, and operations teams with the expectations of the leadership and sales teams. And often the way that the demand planning role is structured within a company can make it more difficult to succeed. Exceptionally talented planners often find that they cannot be effective in their current environment, and this can lead them to consider leaving their role.

To help alleviate these planners' stress and encourage them in their work, here are 5 ways to structure their role so that they can succeed and grow in their work.

Provide Leverage

In many companies, the demand planning role is viewed merely as an advisory role. The planner’s role is simply to provide a perspective on future plans. They have no voice in key planning decisions. While they may be asked to provide data to support a decision, they are rarely asked what they would do based on data. This means that the planner’s experience is often not added to the pool of information that guides decisions. The planner’s knowledge of historical trends, past or current customer activities or plans, and past product performance is frequently ignored. And many planners have experience outside their current role that could also add value to these decisions. My experience in supply planning, sales, buying, merchandising, and systems design have all served me well in my demand planning roles.

So, give the planners a role and a voice in planning decisions. Ask them what they would recommend when making decisions. And do not allow the other voices on the S&OP team to undermine or talk over them. Effective S&OP processes should include every voice that can add value. Ignoring what planners know increases the risk that any decisions made will lack the perspective of the person closest to the data.

Provide Proper Analytical Tools & Support

Demand planning is mostly about data. Deriving value from the data requires user-friendly analytical tools and stable, regularly updated data. While Excel is often the default application for performing analysis, its limitation preclude its use when managing large data sets. Excel is good for presenting summary data to team members who may not be familiar with the underlying data. But getting to the summary level often requires advanced analytical tools such as Power BI, SQL, Python or R. And while planners themselves may understand and occasionally use these tools, a better option is to have data scientists support them. The planner’s role is to analyze the data, not mine it. Planners need to focus on what the data is telling them, and not be burdened with acquiring the data in the first place.

Provide Ongoing Training

The practice of demand planning changes as the business it supports changes. Effectively using new or updated systems, understanding improved internal planning and data management processes and new reporting options all require additional training. Simply expecting planners to “hack” their way forward in understanding and effectively using new tools and processes will only encourage them to develop shortcuts and workarounds that are often more efficient for them but may also bypass some of the value that these new tools and processes offer.

In addition, no company can provide all the training that their planners may need or want. Supporting planners in attending professional conferences and subscribing to professional journals that provide new perspectives on their work is, in my opinion, not a luxury. Yes, these professional development tools are expensive. But they are relatively inexpensive if you consider that without ongoing training, your planners may be using outdated tools to compete with companies that have invested in their people. And we cannot use the same metrics that we use for measuring the ROI of other S&OP processes as the standard for evaluating the ROI of good training programs. Investing in your planner’s professional development will also be a worthwhile investment in retaining talent and reducing turnover.

Provide Career Options and Promote Aggressively

Due to their central position in the S&OP process, demand planners have numerous opportunities to become familiar with how the other S&OE team function. And this can be useful when there are limited opportunities for planners to move up within the planning department. Planners who show an interest in operations, finance or even sales should be encouraged to “try on” these roles. Their experience with data and with managing often conflicting perspectives can prepare them for a variety of roles when they are looking to move beyond demand planning. (And from experience I can tell you that the “burnout” factor in most corporate demand planning roles is high.) Their perceived lack of experience should not be an excuse for limiting their options. Let them experiment with different roles. After all, if they burn out as planners and have no other options within the company, you may lose their talents altogether.

Evaluate Fairly

It is very difficult to fairly evaluate a demand planner’s work. It is all too easy to try to apply the same performance metrics to planning as to the other S&OP teams’ work. I have often seen planners evaluated in relation to processes they cannot influence. Using fill rate, safety stock, WIP levels or production performance metrics that are only marginally related to the planner’s work is neither realistic or fair. Better to use FVA and trailing bias as your basic measure of their work. Adding in overall sales volume but giving it a limited weight factor may also be appropriate. And getting input from the sales teams that planners support is often more valuable than any metric we can derive from data.

Remember that the metrics we choose to use in evaluating a planner’s work communicate to them what we see as priorities. Let us make sure these are both suitable and achievable for our planners.

?Good Planners are Hard to Find but Easy to Keep

With a little planning, we can structure our demand planning roles so that our planners get the support they need to do an often-difficult job. Most planners I know will not ask for these things, so companies need to proactively provide them whenever possible. And given the significant role that planners play in the S&OP process and the value they can add when they are properly supported, it makes good business sense to invest in the people and the processes that effective demand planning can provide.