Podcast: A Day in the Life in Demand Planning – with Victoria Grillo

[00:00:00] Mike Ogle: Welcome to another episode in the Day of the Life series of the Supply Chain Careers podcast. In this series, you hear directly from supply chain professionals about their current positions, their day-to-day responsibilities, what they enjoy about their positions, and how to best prepare yourself to be successful, to do the work plus what it takes to get there and continue advancing along the many career paths in supply chain.

This podcast is made possible by SCM Talent Group, the industry-leading supply chain executive search firm. Visit SCM Talent Group at scmtalent. com.

[00:00:48] Rodney Apple: Welcome to the supply chain cruise podcast. This is our day in the life series. We’re very excited today to welcome Vicki Grillo to the program. Vicki, we appreciate you coming on today.

[00:01:00] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:03] Rodney Apple: Vicki, to start out with, would just love a quick introduction for our audience. How did you get started in terms of your career path with supply chain?

What led you to want to work in this space?

[00:01:15] Victoria Grillo: So early on, I started in retail for the Gap and was involved in kind of merchandise planning for them. And I got really hooked on the kind of combination of using very deep Analytical skills with collaboration with various stakeholders in other areas. So, communication and analytical skills, which I think are both definitely my strengths.

So that was what hooked me early on. Then as I progressed in my career, I had some exposure to CPG companies, which was a little bit more advanced in the demand planning, supply implementations And as a result of kind of working with some of those companies, I had exposure to a lot of some of the various technology and systems that were coming out and involved in a lot of implementation of them and then process improvement using those systems.

And then most recently into beverage and food. And then my last position was with Brooks, heavily involved in creating and, uh, manufacturing running shoes and apparel.

[00:02:33] Rodney Apple: Thank you for that overview. And as I look at your resume and LinkedIn profile, I see you’ve, you’ve chosen this, we’ll call it inventory planning in particular, focused on that demand and forecasting side of planning.

So how would you say, like, how long do you think you’ve worked in the space in terms of demand planning and. You mentioned communication, the analytics, which, which we know are super important, and we’ll get into the reasons why here in a minute, but you know, we’re glad you put that down that particular vertical.

[00:03:01] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, I have probably over 20 years of experience in supply chain, and I think. Most of my exposure, like I said, has been in the demand planning world. But then as I progressed, I got introduced to the S and O P process. And in a lot of my roles, it was creating that for the company I was working for. They didn’t have the process in place at the time.

And then. As I moved to some of the more bigger companies, it was maybe inheriting an SOP process and making it better. Because as we know, an SNOP process is never done. It’s never complete. Right. It’s continuously evolving, and that’s another thing I think that I’ve loved. So much about my career is it’s never static, especially when you’re involved in SNOP, you’re always given new challenges and there’s always ways to make improvements and with everything that’s been going on lately, I think everybody’s had a lot more exposure to that.

Like how important it is to be nimble and to be able to react to these kind of unforeseen things that disrupt supply chain growth. to such a degree that it could really impact a business. So being able to be more preventative and optimize the supply chain in a way so that those types of things don’t disrupt and cause such business impact.

The overall company has been more my recent, I would say last 10 years is really ensuring that the company is best set up to withstand kind of these things that we don’t know. What they’re going to entail or when they’re going to come, but you have a kind of a process, a strong process in place to be able to manipulate them.

[00:04:48] Rodney Apple: Yeah. Risk, such as like a global pandemic once in a hundred year kind of thing.

[00:04:52] Victoria Grillo: Exactly. Or bridge collapsing.

[00:04:55] Rodney Apple: That’s right. That’s right. As a recent example. Yep. Or, or a, uh, shoot. What’s the, I’m going to have to scratch this out. Cause I can’t think of it. The, the canal. Yeah.

[00:05:05] Victoria Grillo: The most recent one is the avocado crop in Mexico, right?

They’re having like a huge issue there.

[00:05:11] Rodney Apple: Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. And it’s a firm that does a lot of work in the food dev space. So we get to see a lot of those impacts to, to the product supply side, if you will. So Vicki. For our audience, and a lot of our audience consists of students that are trying to figure out where they want to start their career, or it could be those that are working in other industries or professions that want to get into supply chain, or maybe they’re in transportation and they feel like they belong in somewhere else.

Could you give us in layman’s terms, when it comes to demand planning and forecasting, could you define it? And what it, Is and why it’s important to a company and kind of what are some of those key objectives that you’re focused on as it relates to the overall supply chain?

[00:05:57] Victoria Grillo: Sure. Yeah. I think defining demand planning is it’s really having the right product available for your customer at the right time.

And what that involves. is forecasting the demand and what you would need in order to be able to do that is strong analytical skills in order to analyze data and come up with your prediction. But you also are heavily dependent. On other cross functional areas because they can really have an impact to what happens to the overall demand areas like sales, if there’s going to be special promotional activity or areas like merchandise or product planning, if they’re going to be launching new products or eliminating.

Products. It’s really important for the demand planning function to understand what that’s going to look like and what the timing is of all those things. So they can build that into the demand planning process. Finance is another key area, really understanding what’s going on from a financial perspective.

And obviously supply planning, understanding the manufacturing process and how long. Things are going to take what the lead times are, so you can build that into your demand plan as well.

[00:07:22] Rodney Apple: And typically, like you think about the forecast, a good analogy is we’re forecast for the people that did the meteorologist that did the weather.

So it’s seven tens out, seven, 10 days out. So when it comes to the demand planning forecast, it’s going to be longer. So could you maybe speak to that side of it? Yeah.

[00:07:39] Victoria Grillo: Yeah. And with each company, it’s a little bit different, but I would say on average, use Gartner as an example, consulting company that comes out and measures a person’s or a company’s supply chain, what level they’re at, you’re considered doing a pretty, I would say, intermediate, um, process if you’re looking at a rolling 18 to 24 month demand plan.

So you really want to look out. Um, that far. And the reason why is because of a lot of the manufacturing and just sometimes it’s the supply of goods that you need to make whatever product you’re making has lead time such that you need to look out that far. Sometimes it’s the manufacturing process. It may take, for instance, at Brooks to launch a new running shoe.

The lead time is about 24 months. So when they’re doing new technology on a running shoe, they have to pull. 24 months out in advance. So those are the kind of key things you need to think about when you’re creating your demand plan, the impacts and and what how far out you need to look. But I would say on average, a rolling 18 to 24 months.

Is, uh, someone who’s doing a good demand planning process.

[00:08:56] Rodney Apple: Sure. You touched on this Vicki earlier. Communication skills are important. The analytical skills are important. Maybe we can break this down a little bit further, maybe. Segmented into the let’s talk about the soft skills 1st, and then we can get into the hard skills like the analytics, but on the soft skills guys communications abroad term.

But we know on the demand side, you’re interfacing more in terms of key stakeholder with the commercial side of the business. So, obviously, that entails sales and marketing predominantly, but could you speak to other soft skills and why it’s so important?

[00:09:32] Victoria Grillo: Sure. Yeah. Demand planning has a monthly cadence to it.

It’s interesting, like, whenever you’re, you have your month closed, let’s say it’s towards the beginning of a month, typically a demand planner is analyzing how accurate their forecast was based on what, how the actuals come in,

[00:09:53] Victoria Grillo: they start to dig in to where maybe there were some issues. Big fluctuations in the demand from what they predicted.

So they try to analyze all that information that first week of the month. And then the second week they’re going out and asking key people, if they can help them understand why something was so different. So it might be salespeople. It might be merchandising people. It could be supply planning people. So you’re digging into the root cause.

Of why the forecast was inaccurate and collaborating and communicating with the different people who could potentially have had an impact on that. Obviously there’s marketing people as well. Maybe there was some sort of promotion that you weren’t aware of, or there was some sort of discount that happened that caused a huge increase in the demand.

So that’s happening that second week of the month. And then the third week is when you really take all that information back and you read. Do your demand plan for that rolling 18 or 24 months. You put that all together and then you typically have an SNOP meeting where you’ve already probably pre presented what your proposed new demand plan is going to be back to those key stakeholders that helped provide you input on why.

Things didn’t work out the way you had originally thought they would. And then you get their, um, buy in into what you want your new proposed demand plan to be, and then you present it in what could be either an SNOP meeting or a demand review meeting, depending on how large the SNOP process is for the company.

And that’s where you’re expanding. To all the key stakeholders and executives, why you want to change your demand plan and what key drivers happened that made you want to change that demand plan. So you’re telling the story of the analysis that you did. Based on your prior demand plan of 18 to 24 months.

And now your proposed new version, what that story is, what the key drivers for making you want to make changes were and why, and then you’re also sharing out the accuracy of the demand plan, and sometimes there’s KPIs, key performance indicators that you’re analyzing and reviewing because you want them to feel confident.

In your numbers, and the only way to really do that is to measure them and track them and communicate them out over a regular kind of cadence. And so that’s the key role of kind of the end of the month. And either the demand review meeting or the SOP review meeting is presenting those new numbers, but then also looking at kind of the.

KPIs, the key measures that you’re tracking so that people can see the continuous improvement over time.

[00:12:42] Rodney Apple: The forecast accuracy, hopefully improves. That’s the goal, right? And so that, so obviously you have to flex those soft skills, right? So you’re presenting, you’re presenting data. You’ve got to take this.

Wide array of data and condense it down into some, yeah, because many times

[00:13:00] Victoria Grillo: you’re presenting it to people. If it’s sales people, they don’t so much like to look at a bunch of spreadsheets. So sometimes if you can do it in more graphical or visual way for them and same with a lot of key executives, you don’t want to have them spending a lot of time trying to do the math in their head, you know, On it, when you pull up a big spreadsheet in front of them.

So it’s, it’s being able to dig into the weeds of the analytics of the situation, but then come up with a story that everybody can understand in a quick and easy way.

[00:13:36] Rodney Apple: And I would imagine on the soft skill side too, at least from what I hear, and this may be where things go wrong, where there’s differences in opinion and you see the stronger personalities, right?

That are on the sales side of a business commercial side. So where does that come into play? Where maybe someone either questions your numbers, or it’s the other way around. You said you were going to sell this amount and this is your quota. That obviously. Can, can disrupt the, uh, forecast.

[00:14:04] Victoria Grillo: Definitely. And, and it, the more that people challenge the information, the better it’s going to be.

Right. But I know that’s hard sometimes because especially in the demand planning world, sometimes you get defensive about the numbers and the work that you’ve done to create these numbers, but the way to think about it is the more challenges you’re getting and the more, you know, people are giving you contrary information, the better your numbers are going to be and the more accurate over time.

And you’ll see it as you report out these key performance indicators, you’ll see that. And then you can also track and measure You know, who was more accurate? Was that accurate information that I got, or did it actually make it worse when I went and changed it based on the information I got? And I don’t think it’s meant to be a finger pointing situation.

It’s more as a company you’re collaborating with. A bunch of different people. You’re trying to get the best thing for the company. You want to produce, like I said, the right amount of product at the right time. And it’s important that everybody come together and challenge and provide information. Each person holds a little special key or a piece of the puzzle.

And it’s the demand planning. Functions job to collect all those pieces and build the puzzle, but it’s not them coming up with the different. Pieces of information. They have to get the information from all these other functions to create kind of the puzzle. I think it’s important to be sensitive when you’re hit with challenges or when you’re, you want to stick to your numbers, you have to be diplomatic.

You have to be a really good listener. Not just always communicating your point of view, but listening to what that other person’s point of view is and why. So I think those are all, yeah, very important skills that maybe people wouldn’t necessarily originally think are important. I think negotiation skills are really key.

You have to know when. To push hard and when to back down, I think the other thing to be sensitive to is, and one of the things I’ve learned over time is sometimes you’re so crunched to pull the information together for an SNLP meeting or a demand review meeting, and you feel like you don’t have time to always put it in front of different people before you present it, what I’ve found is if you do make that time and get their buy in ahead of time, the meeting goes well.

Much smoother, and there’s less issues of people challenging you in the meeting because you’ve already gotten kind of their buy in. They’ve already seen the information. So I think that is really important too, is to really try and get information in front of people so that they feel comfortable with it before you present it in a big executive meeting, or before you start showing a scorecard or any of that, you just want to make sure you’ve.

Individually met with all your key stakeholders ahead of time so that they feel comfortable and they don’t feel like you’re calling them out or pointing something out that they weren’t aware of. So yeah, it’s a bit, it’s definitely a lot of negotiating, a lot of communicating, a lot of collaborating, but then you definitely need the analytical and the love to dig in and figure out why something happened that you didn’t anticipate.

Anticipate

[00:17:33] Rodney Apple: and so we get into problem solving, right? And resolution and maybe we touch on that real quick before we move into the hard skills. So what could go wrong? Vicki, if we don’t, when we don’t get the accuracy, if we miss it by a long shot, whether it’s above or below, could you talk, do you speak to that?

Cause I think that tells the audience that the importance of getting it

[00:17:52] Victoria Grillo: right. There’s a lot of things that could go wrong. Either you could not have enough product and then you miss a bunch of sales, which is. A really bad problem.

[00:18:01] Rodney Apple: Or

[00:18:03] Victoria Grillo: you could have way too much product and it’s sitting around and it’s your inventory turns aren’t happening.

And so your company is spending a lot of money just holding. Either obsolete inventory or inventory that’s not moving. And so they could be spending that money on marketing or different promotions or building another manufacturing plant or whatever. But they’re instead, they’re having to, you know, hold all this inventory that isn’t moving.

I think those are the critical things that, you know, at a high level, but there’s a lot of other issues as well. You could, if you’re not planning. For the right manufacturing, you could be planning to make one type of running shoe when in reality, you don’t need to make that one anymore. And you want to make the next new technology oriented running shoe.

And so your manufacturing capabilities are in the wrong product. And then you lose sales because of that. So there’s, there’s many things that can go wrong. If the demand plan is not accurate. And it’s more at the different stages. If it’s not accurate close in, there’s things that could go wrong. But if it’s not accurate further out, there’s other things that could go wrong.

It’s really balancing all of that and measuring it. And lots of times you want to measure the accuracy of your forecast within that critical lead time. And that might be 6 months, 8 months. So even though you’re doing that rolling 18, 24 month. Demand forecast, the critical point might be six to eight months, because that’s when you’re making the biggest critical decisions that you can’t change.

So that’s important when you’re making the demand plan to spend more focus, more of your time on that area, because that’s going to have the biggest impact to the company.

[00:19:48] Rodney Apple: And it can cost a lot of money where, whether you lose sales or whether you’re holding too much inventory, which can affect the bottom line and your profits slash margins.

And customers aren’t happy. They may not come back or you’ve got like a

[00:20:03] Victoria Grillo: yeah, competitive world. Think of running shoes. That’s my most familiar example that I could put in front of you, but think how many people are making running shoes. And if you don’t have the right running shoe, People still need to run.

So they’re going to go buy another running shoe.

[00:20:16] Rodney Apple: That’s right. And you think about not even the end customer, but the one in the middle, which could be a Walmart or a finish line or whoever it is, they’re not going to be happy if their customers aren’t happy because they’re losing sales too. In a way.

Yeah. Thank you for that. That, that helps really paint some good perspectives.

[00:20:32] Mike Ogle: During this short break, we recognize that this podcast is made possible by SCM talent group. The industry leading supply chain, executive search firm. Visit SCM talent group at scmtalent. com.

[00:20:48] Rodney Apple: And then going back to the hard skills, we let’s maybe break down the, the analytics a little bit, and then any other hard skills like the systems technology that are very important for, for, for demand planning roles.

[00:21:01] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, the technology has changed significantly. So where before a lot of demand planners world was in Excel and even the forecasting, you might’ve been using Excel for that as well. Now I feel like the technology is such where it’s gotten more sophisticated and less expensive in some areas. So even smaller companies are tending to use.

Some sort of technology to do the more manual analytical work. And then most recently, a lot of people are aware of artificial intelligence has come out and it can do some really sophisticated things, which really helps in a supply chain situation, because it can really look at all the different. Areas and potential options that you have and where it would take somebody manually analytically, many man hours to go through all of that, it can do it with the click of a button.

So it could save and create that person, giving them a lot more time to do the analytical side of things, or to go out to the cross functional people, spend more time there because the system is more capable of doing some of this analytical and pulling numbers. together. Way back when I first started in demand planning, it would take almost a week just to pull the whole demand plan together.

It was such a cumbersome manual process to do that, that it could take you a week’s worth of time. And now that can all happen again with the Clipboard. Click of a button. So you don’t need to spend all those hours. And sometimes it’s multiple people doing it all those hours. Yeah. The technology has really changed significantly and it’s enabled, I think, people to become more future thinking, more far, further out.

Thinking so you can be more proactive, not reactive. And I think that’s something that new players coming into the world should think about. They should become aware and even potentially learn some of these new systems that are in the supply chain world. There’s new players coming in with a lot of AI capabilities, like Oh nine and can access and blue yonder.

Those are Three systems, I think that are really coming, leading the pack in the whole AI machine learning area. And I do think that is going to become more and more critical for any kind of size company to be able to better predict these different. Things are better manipulate through some of these volatilities that come up out of nowhere that you can’t predict a lot of these, the softwares that I mentioned, they also allow for scenario planning.

So you can already pre have different scenarios available if certain things happen, and then if that thing does happen, you can go and. You know, recreate that plan that supports that particular situation. So you’re more proactive rather than trying to react to something that hits you unexpectedly.

[00:24:10] Rodney Apple: So you hear the term predictive analysis.

So we’re getting to that things that might happen that you may want to consider, such as you mentioned one shoe company. What if another one is. Launching this product that, uh, takes over the market and makes sure it’s obsolete, uh, which we see that happening all the time, uh, in business.

[00:24:30] Victoria Grillo: Yeah. And at Brooks, we actually did, it was the first time I’ve ever been tasked with this.

We had a five year strategic plan and, um, a lot of the process around that was different scenarios. What if our market share increased by this? What if it decreased by this? What would that plan look like? And we would agree which one we were going to pick and do and what the assumptions were around that five year strategic plan.

But you still have those other iterations. So as things start to play out differently, you can. Re adapt your shorter term plan to better meet whatever you’re seeing from that long strategic plan. Yeah, I think it’s becoming more and more of a need for companies, especially with long lead times and a lot of the manufacturing has changed.

Brooks, when I first got there was doing a lot of stuff in China. They completely pulled out of China. Now everything is Vietnam, Indonesia. That has a huge impact on your five year strategic plan.

[00:25:35] Rodney Apple: Absolutely does. That’s right. And you can’t flip the switch and move out overnight. It takes a lot of time to plan that out.

And that’s a whole different kind of planning there that involves a lot of other stakeholders. So we won’t get it. Speaking of stakeholders, we’ve talked a little bit about that, especially as part SNOP for our audience, if you’re not aware, it’s Sales and operations planning and connecting sales and operations and finance and the executive team to make the right decisions.

We’re going to get that. Yeah, but you hear supply planning is the other big component, right? And so what do you do with that forecast? Where does it go? Gets over to the supplies and that translates into production plans and things like that. Maybe could you elaborate on what I just said to make more sense of it?

[00:26:14] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, sure. Yeah. So the supply planning team typically is working in that shorter lead time period where they want to make sure they’ve got the right. Supply of goods at the right manufacturers to make the right product again, at the right time. So in order to ensure that they’re in the know on everything, lots of times there’s an S and O E meeting, sales operations execution, I think it’s on the East.

That you’re cause you it’s so important that you meet with them weekly. And to talk about things that are not playing out the way you had anticipated so that they can then go back and redo their supply plans

[00:26:57] Rodney Apple: because

[00:26:57] Victoria Grillo: their supply plans are directly correlated to your demand plan.

[00:27:01] Rodney Apple: They’re

[00:27:01] Victoria Grillo: making a supply plan off of your demand plan.

So if your demand plan changes, that means they need to change their supply plan and they need to change it in the right way. It’s critical. I would say that’s probably one of the most. Critical collaborations is the demand planning team with the supply planning team, because that is usually the point where we talked about the lead time point, where if you don’t have the right stuff at the right place, it’s definitely going to be a problem because you’re not going to be able to react fast enough to the change.

So that is where I think. The SNOE meeting comes in, which is a weekly meeting, and it’s just the demand planning team and the supply planning team. Sometimes you might bring in like customer service or logistics, some of the other people who directly impact that supply planning world, but it’s really for the supply planners to get the most accurate.

Best information as quickly as possible and also be alerted to anything that you’re seeing. That’s deviating from what the last set of numbers you gave them are. Does that help?

[00:28:07] Rodney Apple: Absolutely. Thank you for explaining that better than I did. And that supply plan could be if you’ve got 5 or 6 plants making similar products.

So you’re, you’re communicating more at that macro level. And then that gets translated down to the plants production plant, which is an even shorter kind of lead time. What are we? Making this week, how many, what color or what, yeah.

[00:28:29] Victoria Grillo: Yeah. And with running shoes, there’s sizes, there’s genders, there’s colors.

There’s all kinds of crazy things that make it really complicated. Things are changing at that level of detail. The supply planning team needs to know as soon as possible, because they’re not going to be able to make those changes with enough time that, you know, there’s not going to be lost sales as a result of it, not being correct.

Or too much inventory.

[00:28:57] Rodney Apple: Yep. That’s right. Yep. That’s a good overview. I think of the stakeholders and now just would love to segue into what do you enjoy most about? The job and on the flip side of that with some of the headaches and challenges that you might run into just to give our audience that perspective.

[00:29:15] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, sure. What I enjoy most about the job is this ability to solve complex supply chain challenges and achieve measurable improvements in the forecast, accuracy and operational efficiency. And it’s amazing when you can translate that into dollars, which I’ve actually seen, we talked about having too much inventory when you have the right amount of inventory, or even if you’re maybe a better example would be if you can, you Increase your forecast accuracy by just one percentage point.

That might mean you’re carrying, let’s say 200 to 300, 000 pairs of shoes less than you need to. So that’s huge because that amount of money, if you translate that into dollars, let’s say it’s 500, 000 that a company is spending, if you can give that. 500, 000 back and go put it somewhere else if you improve your forecast accuracy by one percentage point.

So imagine what would happen if you improved it by 10 percentage points in two years. So it starts to add up. And I think that’s, what’s really interesting about. The role that I play is you can help under people understand in all the different aspects of the business in sales and merchandising. I think finance probably already has a pretty good take on it, but when you can help communicate it to sales and merchandising and marketing, what that could mean to the company overall, if they can help you create a better, more accurate Forecast, this is what it means to the company.

This is how much more money we will have to work with that. We won’t have to hold in inventory or in obsolete inventory that we’re never going to be able to sell.

[00:30:55] Rodney Apple: Yep. Or you have to mark it down significantly or you lose your margins, they go negative.

[00:30:59] Victoria Grillo: And I think some of the other things, mentoring and developing teams to their full potential is something else that I really enjoy.

I think I’ve had an opportunity to be a leader and a mentor to many different individuals. And I find that very rewarding. And then I think contributing strategically to the business growth. A lot of the companies that I worked at started at a certain level and I saw them double in their revenue, or in some cases triple, or I saw them be able to get purchased by a big competitive company because they were, you know, The competitive company felt like they needed them.

So that’s rewarding to feel like you have contributed to that in, in your ability to make things, create a more accurate forecast, have an SOP process that is contributing in an impactful way to the bottom line of the company. You’re helping the company look better in a numbers world to the point where you can actually see them get more revenue in their bottom line.

So those are some of the things that I. Some of the things that are the biggest challenge, I think balancing supply and demand in kind of the volatile market conditions that have come up recently is very challenging, especially because they’re new things, right? Whoever would have predicted COVID and the impact COVID would have and how long it would have an impact.

So I think that was a huge challenge. Cause when you consider a lot of demand planning, you’re looking at historical movement of a product and what’s happened in the past and trends that have happened in the past with something like COVID happens, it’s going to impact the future in ways that you’ve never seen in the past.

And I think there’s more and more challenges like that happening in the supply chain world. They’re coming faster. They’re bigger. And that is different than maybe 10 years ago. So that’s a new challenge. I think managing. The diverse product portfolios in companies is also really challenging. We talked about the sizing of shoes and the colors of shoes and all the different styles of shoes.

The amount of options I feel like is increasing. So SKU count and, and sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not such great reasons. So maybe you need to keep a good SKU optimization process in place. So you’re not over SKUing. Your product. But I think that’s also a big challenge in kind of demand planning and sales and operations planning.

I think the systems like integrating these new sophisticated systems and the way the technology is changing and figuring out what’s the right fit for your company. I think the demand planning and plays a big role in that. Like you don’t really want the Ferrari if you’re not ready to drive. In those types of car races, maybe you’re okay with the Honda.

I think that’s also becoming a big challenge is what to go after. What makes the most sense. All these things are priced differently. So it’s what is the right. And you want to be strategic because maybe your company is going to double in size or your supply chain is going to become more complex. So maybe you will need something more sophisticated and it’s best to pay more now for that, because.

Let’s face it. It’s a big toll on a company to do a system implementation, especially an integrated one. It affects everyone. So you don’t really want to have to go through that every couple of years. You’d rather be one and done. Cry once. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So I think those are probably the biggest challenges.

Also like sometimes. At different companies, resistance to change is hard because typically in supply chain and demand planning, you’re always trying to do process improvement. And that with that comes a lot of change. So if there’s a lot of resistance to change, that makes the job a little harder. So that’s a challenge, just dealing with that kind of resistance.

Those are the things that I can think of off the top of my head.

[00:35:01] Rodney Apple: Yeah, no, those are the things that we tend to hear too from our clients is there, especially as they’re implementing systems and the change and a lot of people it’s hard, especially as you said, it’s that you start cutting across different functions.

As we wrap up here, we’d love to hear just your perspectives on, we’ve talked about soft skills, hard skills, like what it takes to get into this role. But once you’re in the role, like. Where could you go? What are some common career paths that you see folks moving? Let’s say they’ve done the demand planning thing.

They want to broaden their supply chain horizon. Clearly, they can cut across functions, but is there any, you can go up to into leadership roles, like where you’re at managing a team, but any perspectives to share on career pathing?

[00:35:43] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, I think there’s a lot there. There’s a lot more People are wanting to adapt to this new technology, a lot of companies, or they’re wanting people to focus on their day to day jobs, but then bring in people to help with kind of the process improvement role.

So there’s a lot of these separate roles of almost coming in and just focusing on process improvement. And what would set you up nicely for that is to definitely have a more broader Background. So maybe not just demand planning. I think in one of the things that’s helped me in that is that the sales and operations planning process exposure that I got and a lot of the system implementation exposure that I got.

Cause to do a system implementation, a lot of times you’re working with supply planning or logistics or procurement or these other functions that maybe you’re not. Doing their job, but you become a lot more familiar with what they need to do because you’ve done that. So I think getting as much exposure to the different facets of the supply chain world set people up, I think.

Best for different career advancements. There’s a lot of different consulting positions available now. I think you could even specialize. We talked about like Kinaxis 09. Blue yonder, they’re looking for people with business experience to help when they go sell their product to a company they want to rely on that business person to help them sell why that company needs their system, what they’re gonna gain from using their system.

So I think that is a new area. They’re really heavily relying on business experience and the broader your business experience. Again, the better you’re going to be to get one of those roles. I also think there’s consulting, just general consulting companies that are looking to come in. And sometimes a company doesn’t want to do it themselves.

They don’t, or maybe they want to have a couple of people from the company involved in the implementation. they really want a consulting company to come in and not necessarily the oh nine people or the connex is people, but a separate consulting company that does a lot of implementations across many different.

System integrated system planning systems so that’s another role that I think is available and there’s definitely different levels. And that as well, where you could advance in the consulting world. So those are a couple of things I think that, that come to mind, but I definitely think there’s a lot of opportunity with this type of background.

There’s a lot of areas to go. Gartner is a big consulting firm that basically. They just publish a lot of white paper knowledge or do conferences with business, high level executives from different businesses. And they’re looking for people who have specific business expertise to help write either the white papers or talk to the different customers, give them advice as to what they should go after or not go after.

So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of different options. Available.

[00:38:54] Rodney Apple: Absolutely. And of course, in demand planning specifically, you can, we talked about going up and leading teams, but it’s not just the demand planning team. You mentioned the supply planning team, right? And so you get into where you’re managing.

What we commonly see is titled supply chain planning, right? Or inventory planning, and we won’t get too far in the weeds with sales and operations planning, it’s a whole nother thing, but clearly demand planning is a very key. Component of that more enterprise wide planning last question, Vicky, and we appreciate your time for our audience.

Maybe this is getting them exciting and they’re intrigued about pursuing a career in demand planning. What would you advise? I think, from 2 angles, just resources to go learn more about it. Obviously, there’s associations. There’s no shortage of things on the Internet to, like, how they might want to start seeking out a career path where they might want to start.

[00:39:48] Victoria Grillo: Yeah, there’s a lot of, I think, different resources available. I think the Institute of Business Forecasting is a really good resource. They publish a lot of information. They have a website, they hold conferences, um, they do different certifications. So if you’re interested in. Learning, and then you become attracted to something.

You can get a certification in it. And I think that the more you can educate yourself, the more training, the more knowledge, even when it comes to some of these integrated business planning systems, like we’ve talked about, there’s a lot of on LinkedIn, there’s a lot of. Free learning that you could go in and explore and get familiar with some of these systems.

You can also do project management training, all kinds of stuff. It’s all free on LinkedIn. And then Gartner was another thing that we talked about. If you’re interested in consulting the, they have a website, you can go look, you can look at some of the positions that they have, and they have a bunch of different roles, I think, for, People, not just the consultant go out their role, but I mentioned the white paper writing, doing research on things.

So if you like writing or researching, that might be a good area for you. But yeah, another resource is Oliver White for sales and operations planning. We talked a little bit about that to learn more about that. They offer a certification in that different training available. And then they also have a website that you could go to just to understand it.

Better. There’s also. Tons of books available. We had earlier talked about that the Institute of Business Forecasting is going to be publishing a big book on S and O P sales and operations planning in July. And that’s an easy way to understand what that process is and what an effective S and O P process looks like.

So those are a few things. But yeah, I think the continuous learning is very important, especially in the supply chain world.

[00:41:54] Rodney Apple: It is having a growth mindset is absolutely critical with the advancements in technology and just ways of doing things. And I would add too, from my perspective, just looking at the lens we cut across all industries, all things supply chain, it’s companies of all shapes and sizes.

Probably one of the most frequently requested searches that we’re asked to work on is in the planning arena. And more oftentimes on the demand planning side, because it’s 1 thing, like you said earlier, that we’ve hit on quite a bit to have the hard skills, but the soft skills are equally important in these roles to be able to collaborate and problem solve and influence and present data and things like that.

It’s a hot area. And then you also talked about not just the consulting companies, not just the companies that make the product or sell the product. But you’ve got the technology. So if you have a knack, if you’re a IT person, there’s no shortage, they’re all looking for good people that can either help develop and refine the next evolution of the product or get out with the clients and implement or sell, if that’s your thing, it’s a hot area to be in and no shortage of opportunities, Vicky, we really appreciate your time and sharing your supply chain career journey with us today.

And all the wonderful advice and perspectives that you’ve shared for our audience. So thank you for your time.

[00:43:10] Victoria Grillo: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

[00:43:16] Mike Ogle: Thanks for listening to this episode of the supply chain careers podcast. Be sure to listen to other episodes and sign up to be notified when future episodes are released as we continue to interview industry leading supply chain experts. This podcast is made possible by SCM talent group, the industry leading supply chain executive search firm.

Visit scm talent group. At scmtalent. com