Supply chains have always had to contend with disruptions, and that will not stop, says Lusi Zheng, senior director, advisory at Gartner. That's why planners must remain agile.

Given the number of disruptions during and since COVID-19, surely no one can argue that being agile and resilient isn’t important to the supply chain, Zheng says. In fact, Gartner research indicates that at least 79% of all supply chain leaders believe being agile is the top priority in their shops. In other words, it’s imperative that they be able to “manage changes, not just going fast, but how we balance, speed, cost, and quality.”

All of which leads to the role of supply chain planning. There are three important aspects to that, Zheng says. “Typically, we only think about one, which is operations agility. With S&OP [sales and operations planning], that's agility. But there are two other pieces that we don't think enough of. One is design agility. How do we structure our capabilities and our processes to enable us to be super responsive, to be ready to respond? Maybe it's making our processes more composable.

“The third one is, within our existing design and structure, how can we add flexibility, especially for the customers that matter the most?”

How much more agile can a company be? Zheng says planners that perform really well start by mapping out all processes. “For example, they ask which ones are least adaptable, and which ones are slowing us down the most. Then they apply agility principles to them, and test it out it with a couple of use cases.”

Zheng says planners have been “firefighting” challenges the last few years. So that their important role isn’t taken for granted, planners must consider how to stay top of people's minds within their organizations.