Supply chain advisor Stephan de Wit on the decision ownership gap that turns an accurate plan into a slide nobody reopens.
Why a sharper plan hasn't made your decisions any faster
The simple formula behind why decisions take so long
Four shifts that turn your plan into faster action
Supply chain teams have spent years sharpening their forecasts, and it shows: plans hold up, data arrives on time, dashboards look better than ever. And yet, when a real exception lands, the answer still waits three weeks for a meeting. Investment kept flowing into the plan itself, not into what happens after it. Our observation: the constraint has moved, and most organisations haven't noticed.
Jack Cheesbrough, CEO of planning solution I-plan, puts it simply: decision latency equals complexity multiplied by options, divided by clarity. Most planning budgets over the past years went into options, better scenarios, faster modelling, more what-ifs. Each one raises the numerator. Clarity, the variable that actually divides the result, gets the smallest share of the investment.
At Quicksilver client Elho, an international production setup with real complexity, the team stopped adding scenarios and started asking what the supply chain would look like in an ideal world first. That's clarity, not another option.
None of this shows up on a P&L line. It shows up in the meetings that produce alignment instead of action.
You don't need sharper scenarios. You need someone with the mandate to decide once they're in front of you.
Start with one question: which decisions are we actually here to make today? If the honest answer is none, in your last three meetings, you're running a reporting cycle, not a steering one.
From there, fix the agenda in advance, give your planners a threshold within which they can act without escalating, and bring cost, cash and service into the same conversation. AI already shortens the modelling step; it won't shorten the moment someone has to decide. That's the part you build, and it's the part that turns your planners from explaining last month into shaping the next one.
Here you'll find the answers to some questions you might have
Decision latency is the time between a signal arriving and the decision that answers it. Jack Cheesbrough of I-plan makes it measurable as complexity times the options your team weighs, divided by the clarity you have on the trade-off. It says nothing about the quality of your plan and everything about your ability to act on one.
Forecast accuracy measures the plan. Decision latency measures what your organization does after it. The two connect: a late decision disrupts the next planning cycle, and that disruption returns as lower forecast accuracy. Improving the forecast without addressing latency treats the symptom.
A way of reading a trade-off in three connected dimensions. A decision that optimizes cost has consequences for working capital and for service levels, every time. Teams who know the shape of those consequences in advance decide faster, because the hesitation that slows a decision down is usually uncertainty about what a choice costs somewhere else.
Start with the meeting. Decide what needs deciding before it opens, prepare the information at the level those decisions need, and give the people closest to the data the mandate to act inside agreed thresholds. Most organisations already own more planning capability than their decision process can use.
Stephan de Wit (Quicksilver), Jack Cheesbrough (I-plan) and Maurice Stevens (Elho), recorded on location at Elho. 30 minutes, Dutch subtitles.
Rico can answer all your questions!
rico.de.heer@quicksilverconsultancy.com
06 23 27 31 94
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