Activity Without Value

A typical S&OP cycle looks very similar to this: the frantic last-minute building of the decks, reviews that need hours of preparation, and somewhere in the mix the work of planning, improving forecast models and designing better decisions needs to be done. Next month, the cycle repeats.

The hidden cost may not be visible at first, however it’s clearly in the hundreds of cumulative hours a month that go into preparation and process that could be handled differently.

Like anything, a planning team that sticks to such activities, will get very competent in designing presentations to please executives and stakeholders, while the analytical or knowledge work that should receive the most attention falls behind. The outcome is the team becoming great at process cycle execution rather than excellent in their craft, and therefore the quality of output suffers.

People who get energy from solving hard problems under uncertainty tend to move on once they realize the job is mainly administrative. Those who stay adapt, and eventually defend the process.

Ultimately, decision quality suffers in the long term. When humans are buried under work the system should be doing, real judgment calls get whatever attention is left over. When the system produces outputs nobody trusts, people override everything manually and burn capacity that should be going elsewhere. Either way, the organisation ends up with the worst of both worlds.

The proposed solution is changing the allocation of tasks — what the system handles versus what actually needs a human in the loop.

Everything else is just activity.