S&OP Engineering II: Demand Planning from Guessing to Probability
Your Excel says “we’ll sell 100 units.” A round, clean, deterministic number. What if you sell 120? Stockout, unhappy customer, contractual penalty. What if you sell 50? 50 units sitting in your warehouse, immobilizing capital that could be generating returns. The problem isn’t the forecast itself. It’s the arrogance of the single number. In Chapter 1 we built a “Quality Valve” that filters ERP noise. Now that we have a pure signal, we’re going to do something Excel can’t: measure uncertainty. ...