The Demand Planning Decision Table

When demand moves, the first question should not be "who was wrong?" That sounds obvious, but it happens more often than people admit. The team explains the variance, the baseline was too high, a promotion did not lift the way it was expected to, orders moved between weeks, a customer pulled back. All of that is useful, but it is still only the diagnostic layer. The real value starts when the team asks what the miss changes. Does inventory need to move? Does capacity need to shift? Does supply need to be expedited, delayed, or rebalanced? Does the customer promise still hold? This is where demand planning becomes more than a forecast review. The forecast is an input, but the demand plan is the operating commitment the business chooses to make after looking at the signal, the assumption, the risk, and the trade-off. A stronger demand review separates four things very clearly: - what signal changed - where the forecast missed - which assumption needs to be tested - which decision changes next And if the same miss keeps coming back, the answer is not always to tune the model harder. Sometimes the team needs to update the assumption the model is built around. That is the idea behind this decision lens: read the miss, test the assumption, and then change the decision with discipline. If actual demand moved away from the forecast tomorrow, which decision would your team change first?