Adrian Wood, strategic business development and marketing director with Dassault Systèmes, explains why there's so often a gap between the "perfect" plan and the reality of operations on the shop floor.

C-suites might spend a lot of time on strategic planning, and acquiring the technology to support it, but they still end up “firefighting” when those best-laid plans go awry and the unexpected occurs. So what’s missing from their efforts?

When it comes to daily operations, any number of disruptions can occur, and make it difficult to execute on the plan. “There’s a gap between the strategic plan and what happens on a day-to-day basis at the factory and on the shop floor,” Wood says. “There’s a need for additional planning and scheduling.”

Trends that affect operations are far more localized and tactical in nature these days. The automotive industry might have been prepared for the coming of electric vehicles, and could plan accordingly. But it’s a different story when tariffs change virtually every day, or there’s a disruption at a local supplier. “It’s all part of death by 100 cuts,” Wood says, “chipping away at strategic plans. Companies don’t really know how to react to that until it happens.”

When a “perfect” plan deviates from reality — in the form of a labor dispute, machine downtime or sudden unavailability of a key component, the result is eroded margins, missed customer orders and higher costs due to the need to expedite shipments.

Against this backdrop of constant crisis, it might come as a surprise that so many companies still rely on old-fashion production boards, spreadsheets and legacy technology for planning. Wood says they need to adopt modern-day artificial intelligence and machine-learning tools to detect patterns of disruption, and build safeguards into future schedules.