The morning your best planner spends rebuilding a spreadsheet is a morning nobody spends deciding what to buy.
It is 7:40 in the morning. Your demand planner is not planning. She is pulling last night's sales into a spreadsheet, reconciling it against open purchase orders, and copying numbers from three screens into a fourth. By the time the data is clean enough to trust, half the morning is gone and the real work has not started.
This is not a story about one person having a bad day. It is the job. Across the industry, supply chain teams spend nearly 14 hours a week, almost two full workdays, manually tracking data, according to a 2024 survey from LeanDNA and Wakefield Research. That is time your most experienced people spend on data prep instead of judgment.
The Fast Movers Run Out. The Slow Movers Pile Up.
You have seen the pattern. A top SKU stocks out on a Tuesday while a pallet of something nobody is ordering sits in the same aisle, tying up cash. It is not that your team is careless. It is that no one has time to look at every SKU, so the exceptions hide in the long tail until they turn into a lost sale or a write-off.
The scale of that quiet leak is bigger than most teams realize. Overstocks and stockouts cost retailers and their suppliers an estimated $1.77 trillion globally, per research from IHL Group. Some of that number is sitting in your warehouse right now. The question is which part.
Your ERP Tells You What Happened, Not What to Do
Here is the part that wears people down. Most planning still runs on spreadsheets bolted to an ERP that records history but does not guide the next decision. The system is a rear-view mirror. It is very good at telling you what already sold and what you already bought. It says nothing about what you should do next.
That gap is common. More than three-quarters of supply chain executives, 76 percent, say they lack a predictive view of supply and demand, the same 2024 survey found. So the forward-looking work, the part that actually protects margin, gets done by hand, in side tools, by people who are already out of hours in the day.
So Here Is What We Keep Asking
If you run planning at a distributor, sit with these for a minute:
- What would your planners do with two days a week back?
- Which of your stockouts last quarter were truly unpredictable, and which ones were just missed?
- You keep hearing that AI can help here. Have you actually seen it do the work, on a real planning screen, not a demo slide?
We are not going to answer those in a blog post. We are going to show you. On Thursday, September 3 at 2:00 PM ET, Jim Harris of Western Computer and Jeffrey Porter of StockIQ are giving an exclusive preview of AI in the planning workflow: a demand planner's day with AI in it, on Microsoft Dynamics 365, including a first look at an agent that watches the data, drafts the forecast, and recommends the buy, with a planner still in charge.
Why We Are Hosting This
Western Computer has spent nearly 40 years and more than 1,750 implementations helping distribution and food and beverage companies get more out of their technology. We have watched planning evolve from paper to spreadsheets to Microsoft Dynamics 365, and we are honest about what new tools are ready to do and what they are not. This session is that same practical read on AI.
If the 7:40 spreadsheet scene sounds like your team, come see what the morning could look like instead. Save your spot for the webinar here.
