Supply chain advisor Stephan de Wit on the system ownership gap that turns million-euro planning investments into expensive furniture.
Most planning system failures trace back to ownership, not technology. The tools are capable. The problem sits in how organisations position, govern, and develop them.
Planners in organisations with broken system management spend their time reconciling data across Excel sheets rather than running scenario analyses. The planning system adds work instead of removing it.
Closing the gap requires business ownership of the system and an internal team committed to developing it continuously — treated as ongoing work, not a post-go-live phase that ended at launch.
Organisations whose planning systems underdeliver look first at the technology. They ask whether the vendor was the right choice, whether the configuration was thorough enough, whether the platform was correctly sized. Stephan de Wit, supply chain advisor at Quicksilver Consultancy, has sat in those conversations across dozens of organisations and arrives at a different starting point.
"The systems are there," he says. "A tool for demand planning, a tool for supply planning, a platform for finance planning. On paper, everything is covered."
The gap sits in how those systems are owned and governed.
Planning teams in organisations with underperforming systems share a pattern that rarely surfaces on any dashboard.
"If you look at how decisions are actually made (in the monthly cycle, the weekly cycle, when something unexpected happens) you see something different," Stephan says. "Excel sheets adjusting outcomes. Scenarios discussed in PowerPoint, not simulated in the system. Changes that take weeks because the knowledge sits with an external party."
The system exists. The value it was bought to create has not arrived.
A second symptom compounds this. System knowledge concentrates in one or two people. When they move on, the model's institutional memory goes with them. Teams build scenario analyses but rarely connect them to the decisions those analyses were designed to support. Some systems slow after implementation. That points to poor configuration or a mismatch between what the platform can handle and what the organisation needs from it.
Stephan describes one organisation where the pattern had become measurable.
Ninety-five per cent of decisions ran through Excel in practice. The planning platform sat alongside it, maintained, functional, and worth millions. Commercial, supply, and finance planning each used their modules. But the moment a decision needed to be made, planners moved the numbers into spreadsheets and adjusted them outside the system. The platform had become a recording tool.
"We often map out a path toward maturity," Stephan says. "If you reach the first goal but stay stuck there and don't move forward, you lose money and attention. Decisions get postponed. You're in a negative spiral of not realising the value of your system."
The platform cost was visible and already spent. The real damage was everything that did not happen: decisions deferred and scenarios no one ever modelled.
The costs do not appear in one place. They accumulate across three areas.
Planning capacity. Planners in organisations with broken system management spend a significant part of their working week reconciling numbers between the planning platform and Excel files rather than analysing or simulating. The system existed to free up that capacity. It multiplies the burden instead.
Decision quality and speed. A system that cannot run reliable scenarios leaves decisions waiting. The board asks for a forward-looking view across four months. Producing the answer takes weeks. By the time it arrives, conditions have shifted. "You lose what you don't do," Stephan says. Postponed decisions and missed adjustments do not surface on any dashboard. They accumulate.
Strategic ceiling. Ambitions like continuous rolling forecasting and integrated planning require a system that keeps pace with the organisation's development. If system management stalls after go-live, those ambitions stay out of reach. "If you can't move along, you need more people or more expensive people," Stephan says. "Buy a platform and fail to extract the business value. It becomes an expensive platform. AI stays a distant horizon, when it is available today."
Stephan runs a five-level root cause analysis on underperforming planning systems and reaches the same conclusion across organisations.
Excel stays dominant because the system does not support the real business questions. Someone configured the system around process steps rather than around the decisions the business needs to make. No business owner corrects that configuration, because IT manages the platform, Finance manages the data, and Supply Chain manages the volumes. No function owns the end-to-end outcome. At root, the organisation treated the system as an IT project from day one.
"The management of the system is the problem," Stephan says. "And we see that at the largest companies too."
A second failure mode runs alongside this. Organisations implement a new tool. The way of working does not change. The implementation team focused on the technology, not on use. No one built an internal team to maintain and develop the system after launch. Continuous improvement never made it onto anyone's agenda. The organisation declared the system complete at go-live and managed it as something finished rather than developing it as something ongoing. That gap between what the system can do and what the business needs widens one planning cycle at a time.
The diagnostic question Stephan uses to assess where an organisation stands: who is allowed to change the system tomorrow, without calling the vendor?
"If the answer is nobody," he says, "you don't have a system owned by the business. You have a rented system. And you are dependent on the agenda of an external party for every change your business reality demands of you."
Organisations that have closed the gap make one foundational shift: they position their planning system as a steering instrument owned by the business. That decision determines everything that follows.
Three things change in practice.
The system is owned by the business. A person with a business role, not IT, not the vendor, holds accountability, controls the budget, and carries the mandate to develop the system alongside the organisation's planning ambitions.
An internal team maintains and develops the system continuously. The function matters more than the label. This team bridges business questions and system capability, understands the model, and can make changes without a three-week vendor wait. Continuous improvement is an ongoing business responsibility.
The system is built for where the organisation is going. If the ambition is integrated planning in two years, the system needs to support that trajectory now. "The planning systems of today are already far ahead of the people using them, or the organisations that bought them," Stephan says. An organisation that does not grow into that capability hits the same ceiling, regardless of what it spent on the tool.
Stephan points to a maturity path running from reactive execution toward scenario-based and predictive planning. Each step requires the system to develop with the organisation. That requires the business to hold ownership over how the system grows.
Stephan sees AI changing how planning systems get built and modified, not just adding features inside them.
"The contemporary systems are almost all AI-driven," he says. "That pace is only accelerating. Organisations have to structure themselves around that."
Two shifts matter most in practice.
A planning model that once took three months to configure now takes days. Organisations are more willing to adjust or rebuild configurations when the cost of doing so drops. The risk of staying locked into one that no longer fits drops with it.
Connecting ERP, CRM, and planning platforms no longer requires months of coupling work. Integration that was historically the most expensive part of a planning technology project has become manageable within a realistic project timeframe. Scenario analysis becomes part of the standard planning conversation rather than a separate project. "The technique is already there," Stephan says. "Systems need to be able to convert questions. You speak your question or type it, and the system builds a model and returns a numerical or visual answer."
Stephan distinguishes between organisations that have AI and organisations that use it well. The difference shows in planning cycle speed and whether planners spend their time on scenario analysis or on data reconciliation.
A planning system owned and developed by the business changes the daily work of planning.
Planners model what Q3 could look like under different demand assumptions rather than explaining why last month's forecast diverged. The system becomes something they trust enough to interrogate.
Stephan describes a retail organisation operating across 19 countries and more than 10,000 locations where the organisation approached the project as a business investment from day one. The organisation built an internal team immediately. AI came into the process early. "After a number of years, we see the maturity of the organisation growing, and the system has always grown with it," he says.
The system became an asset rather than a liability. Planners could ask questions they could not formulate before, because the system developed alongside their analytical needs. "The whole organisation notices it," Stephan says. "The quality of plans goes up, and the performance of the organisation goes with it."
Stephan closed the webinar with three:
"If these questions create debate in your team," Stephan says, "that's usually where the real opportunity is."
Organisations that treat planning systems as IT projects build systems that get managed. Those that treat them as business instruments build systems that grow.
Business ownership, a team that keeps the model current, and continuous improvement built into how the system is governed: with those in place, planning cycles accelerate, scenario analysis becomes standard practice, and AI capabilities move into the monthly planning conversation rather than staying on the improvement roadmap.
"The system becomes an asset," Stephan says. "A piece of added value, not a burden. You're able to ask questions you couldn't have considered before, because the system thinks with you."
Owning a capable tool is the easier part. Positioning it, governing it, and developing it alongside the business is where most organisations fall short.
Most planning system failures trace back to ownership, not technology. The tools are capable. The gap opens when organisations position the system as an IT asset rather than a steering instrument owned by the business. Without a business owner and an internal team committed to continuous improvement, organisations revert to Excel within months of go-live.
Excel fills the gap between what the system can do and what the business needs to know. That gap exists because someone configured the system around process steps rather than business decisions, and because no business owner can change the system without going through the vendor first. Planners work around the system rather than through it.
A person with a business role, not IT and not the vendor, holds accountability for the system, controls the budget, and carries the mandate to develop it alongside the organisation's planning ambitions. Distributing that responsibility across IT, Finance, and Supply Chain is the primary reason ownership gaps open.
AI reduces the time and cost of building planning models. Configurations that once took months now take days. Scenario analysis moves from a separate project into the standard planning conversation, with questions answered in hours rather than weeks. Connecting planning platforms to ERP and CRM data no longer requires months of integration work. Access to AI is the baseline. The organisations that benefit are those that structure themselves to use it.
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