The Plan You Actually Believe

Here's the short version of this week: one feature that puts the planner back in charge of the demand number, and a new Q&A section.

🧠 S&OP: Why the Loop Never Closes

Every CPG brand talks about S&OP, but few actually run it end-to-end. Most brands have the monthly meeting on the calendar with leaders who saw the process work at a Fortune 500 brand. And still the loop stays open.

Trade promotion runs in one system, demand planning in another, supply planning and finance in Excel, and none of them read from a shared source of truth, so the supply planner ends up doing the integration by hand: forecast from a CSV, inventory from a 3PL portal, open POs from the ERP, lead times from a supplier email, all reconciled every Monday morning.

By the time the supply plan is ready, the demand plan underneath it is four days stale.

The phase built to catch this drift, Pre-S&OP, where the plan gets translated into dollars, is the one many brands either skip or run as a status meeting, and the numbers show what happens next: 64% of supply chain leaders make their decisions inside the 12-week execution window, meaning by the time anything gets decided, planning has already collapsed into execution.

Thilo Hamann, our Head of Demand Planning, ran S&OP transformations at Philips for twelve years before Confido. His full breakdown of what closing the loop actually takes: here.

📦 Supply Planning: Override the Demand Number You Don't Believe

Every planner has had this moment: the demand number feeding the supply plan is wrong, and you know it. The forecast can't see what hasn't hit the data yet: the buyer who verbally committed to more shelf space at the next reset, or the promo everyone planned around that just got pulled. Until now, your options were to edit around it or keep the real number in a side spreadsheet.

New in the supply planning workspace: a Demand Override row. It works like the Plan Adjustments row you already use. Type the demand number you believe into the cell. Untouched periods stay blank, so a blank cell and an explicit zero override stay distinct. The override flows through the inventory calculations, and there's API support if your team works programmatically.

The payoff: the supply plan runs on the number you actually believe, and the inventory math moves with it. The side spreadsheet dies.

🔧 Want the Full Changelog?

This newsletter covers the highlights, not everything we ship. Under the hood, product updates land every week: new features, fixes, small workflow improvements that never make it into an edition like this one.

If you'd read a separate weekly release notes email, every product and feature update in one place, no commentary, let us know below. If enough of you want it, we'll start sending it.

💬 Q&A with Confido’s CEO, Justin

"How should shelf life and expiration dates factor into PO recommendations, when you're weighing existing inventory against new product coming in?" 

Here's where we are on it. Today, Confido applies a single minimum shelf life, say six months, filters inventory by lot code, and flags inventory that will hit that mark based on accumulated demand. The data model already supports shelf life rules down to the customer and DC level for specific products, but customer-specific shelf life requirements are not built yet.

The practical approach in the meantime: group customers into shelf life buckets, nine-month, six-month, four-month, and break out inventory, demand, and safety stock by tier instead of planning per customer. We're building the fuller functionality near term, and we're shaping it with customer input.

Have a planning question? Reply to this email. Best one gets answered next week.

🎥 See It Live

We walked customers through our new Supply Planning module (watch the recording here), and Thilo Hamann, our Director of Demand Planning, is hosting another webinar for those who missed it on July 30th

📅 Where to Find Us

🤝 Confido’s Referral Program 

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Every referral helps us build a better product for the whole community - thank you.

🥕 That’s a Wrap. See You Next Week!

As always, if you have questions or want a walkthrough of any of these features, book a demo or reach out to your CSM - we're here to help you get the most out of Confido.

One ask before you go: send this to a CPG person you love.