Some Buyers, Planners & Supply Chain Managers Go Fishing While Others Stay Chained to the Desk
Some Buyers, Planners & Supply Chain Managers Go Fishing While Others Stay Chained to the Desk
The Saturday Morning Reality: It’s a sunny Saturday in late May. You should be on the river. Instead, you’re staring at three different versions of an Excel sheet, trying to figure out why your ERP is screaming at you.
The “Dominoes Falling" Failure: This is the hidden cost of traditional MRP. Because the system is perfectly coupled and backwards-planned, the failure of one domino knocks over the rest. When the $500 order of specialized bracket mounting sets didn’t show up on Friday, it doesn’t just delay the assembly build - it paralyzes your entire weekend.
Your inbox is overflowing with expedite, reschedule and cancel messages from the company ERP. The alerts contradict each other, and the dates don’t line up.
You’ve got three different versions of the production schedule open in Excel, each trying to reconcile supply dates with shifting customer orders.
The Text from Mike: Then your phone buzzes. It’s Mike. He’s holding a monster cutthroat trout. He’s a planner, too. Same industry. Same volatility. So why is he out fly-fishing while you’re in a swivel chair?
How Mike Escaped: Mike didn't get lucky. He stopped trying to 'out-forecast' the chaos and started Engineering Resilience. By using Strategic Decoupling, he built a firebreak between his weekend and his supplier lead times.
So, I want to ask you a few questions:
First Question: Have you ever missed something important at home because of a planning crisis at work?
A kid’s game. A birthday. A dinner you said you’d be at because an MRP run changed overnight, or a supplier blew up a lead time, or a critical shortage appeared out of nowhere.
I ask because in most companies, when planning breaks it doesn’t usually break quietly.
Many planners may have come to believe that weekend work, long hours and stress is just "part of the job."
It’s not. It’s a symptom.
And that makes Quality of Life into a structural property of your supply chain planning system.
A lot of people in planning have had to learn to become heroes when the planning system breaks. And unfortunately, that often means paying for it in the currency and at the cost of Quality of Life.
Cost isn’t just freight and inventory. It’s stress, long days, events missed and a job that never really turns off.
Second Question: How often do these "Hero Mode" symptoms affect your work week?
The Shadow System: I rely on manual Excel spreadsheets to find the "truth" because the formal system doesn't reflect reality.
The Morning Chase: I spend hours of my day reacting to "Past Due" reports, exception messages and urgent emails rather than planning ahead.
System Nervousness: A small change at the top of a bill of materials causes a massive "earthquake" of rescheduling for my components.
The Whiplash: I am told to expedite a part on Monday, only to be told it's no longer needed on Thursday.
Third Question: If you could reclaim your headspace and bandwidth by stabilizing the planning system and have all execution work settled by 10:30 AM, which of these strategic capabilities would you prioritize building and finally have the headspace to tackle?
Strategic Sourcing: Building long-term, collaborative relationships with key suppliers.
Root Cause Problem Solving: Investigating why disruptions happen instead of just reacting to them.
New Product Launch Support: Working with NPD / Engineering to ensure new products are designed for supply chain flow.
Process Innovation: Using data to find long-term trends and competitive advantages.
Professional Growth: Spending time on higher-level S&OP and business leadership skills.
I’ve seen a lot of change over the years in the kind of tools and capabilities available in the supply chain space as technology has evolved.
They haven’t always lived up to all their promises.
And that has left organizations to figure out ways to just get by for many, many years as they waited for technology to kind of catch up and create new capabilities for them to do planning with stability even in a much more volatile environment. And through all the waiting for technology to catch up, the one essential tool has been Excel to close the gaps.
Given the rough patch we’re in, of operating with much more volatility, one of the most important enablers is the willingness to actively explore alternative approaches to the way we’ve always done things, and to acquire the ‘thought-ware’ to improve people and leadership so they continually add value to the organization and their careers.
So, I have a few suggestions for the Supply Chain or Distribution Center Managers, the Demand Planners, the Material Planners (MRP Planner), the Purchasing Agents and the Inventory Managers out there.
Come listen to one of the stories of transformation from conventional planning rules and tools where a company with long lead times, with highly intolerant customers and where providing high service came with a huge personal price tag and stress. Listen to Ricardo Bribiesca talk about the success at PPG America Latina using the Demand Driven MRP approach. https://vimeo.com/1022512538
Check out our SAPIX Solutions global calendar of course offerings to help you move from a supply chain world of juggling Jell-O, to one where you have the bandwidth to spend more time on the things you want to spend it on. https://sapix.mx/calendario.pdf
Finally, check out the many other case studies and videos to find one from an industry just like yours. https://www.demanddriveninstitute.com/case-studies