There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted. – James Branch Cabell (1879-1958)

What are my current stock levels? What’s the status of my inbound orders? How were the weekend sales for my products?

A great deal of effort has been spent over the last 2 decades to provide this information to planners and decision makers in near real time. But how useful is it, really?

We like to call this the “salt, sugar and fat” of supply chain planning. It’s extremely satisfying to get answers to these questions in the moment, but the satiation wears off quickly and you find yourself asking the same questions a few days later.

These types of supply chain visibility metrics are merely a glimpse in the rearview mirror. The myriad activities that give rise to a particular inventory level, a change to an order status or a weekend sales result have already happened and have been happening for days, weeks or even months before the question was even asked.

It’s like sitting at the gate and your airline announces a departure delay. You would rather have that information than not, but if that’s all the information you get, you have no control over the outcome. All you know is that you won’t be getting to your destination on time.

Now, suppose that you’re a savvy traveller. Hours before you even leave for the airport, you check the tail number for the inbound flight. Then you check the origin city of that flight and a massive storm is rolling through right around the time it’s supposed to depart, virtually guaranteeing a significant delay.

What are you going to do? Try to get booked on a different airline whose inbound aircraft is not coming from the city that’s about to get pummelled? Extend your hotel stay for another night because there’s no way you’ll be getting out at a reasonable time? Rent a car and just make it a road trip instead? Or just suck it up and leave on your scheduled flight, even though you know you’re going to be significantly delayed.

Any of those options may be acceptable, depending on your needs and constraints (e.g. cost, how urgently you need to get to your destination, whether or not the distance is reasonably driveable). But you only have one option available if you didn’t see the problem coming and only learned about it when you were sitting at the gate.

The point here is that knowing where things currently sit is certainly useful, but nowhere near as useful as being able to anticipate what things will be like in the future. Constantly checking in on up-to-the-minute information about the very recent past may give you a sense of control, but in reality, you’re just sitting in the back seat bingeing on cheeseburgers and donuts.

In a supply chain context, focusing too much on “real time current” information can lead to false conclusions and bad decisions (or non-decisions).

You look at your current DC and store stock levels and everything looks nice and healthy, so you breathe a sigh of relief and move on to the next item. But a promotion is scheduled in 2 weeks that’s going to virtually wipe you out. And your lead time from the supplier is 4 weeks. This is an example of something that is a big problem, but it doesn’t look like a problem in the current data. The cost is lost sales that could have been avoided.

You move on to another item and you see that 30% of your stores are out of stock. So, you panic. You spend the morning trying to figure out how can this be? What happened? And you have a bunch of higher-ups (who are looking at the same “here and now” data that you are) asking the same questions. Meanwhile, an order was just triggered with the supplier that covers the shortfalls and is due to arrive in a few days. Within a week or so, all of the stores will be back in stock. This is an example of something that looks like a big problem in the current data, but really isn’t much of a problem at all. The cost is stress and lost productivity trying to solve a problem that has already been automatically solved.

Subsisting on a diet consisting mainly of salt, sugar and fat is not good for one’s long term health. So, how do you kick the habit?

Like the savvy air traveller, you need to give yourself a window into the future to know all of your options and make the best decisions in advance.

Properly cooked, an end-to-end planning process that is designed to always maintain a valid simulation of reality is a very tasty and nutritious vegetable.