Reinventing the consumer goods value chain

The consumer goods value chain was optimised over decades for a stable pattern of demand: forecast a season, produce to the forecast, push it through distribution, and correct with promotions when the forecast was wrong.

Each of those steps now runs on a slower clock than the demand it serves, and the correction step has become permanent.

Integrated planning is the current bet

Fifty-six percent of companies are prioritising integrated business planning over narrower demand-driven inventory work. The logic is that optimising supply against a forecast nobody trusts produces a precise answer to the wrong question.

Integration is mostly an organisational achievement. The commercial, supply and finance teams have to agree on one set of numbers, which is harder than the systems work.

Promotions as a symptom

Heavy promotional dependence is usually read as a pricing problem. More often it is a planning problem: inventory in the wrong place, and discounting is the fastest available correction.

Companies that improve placement accuracy find their promotional intensity falls without anyone changing the pricing strategy.

Sustainability moved into the chain

Reporting obligations pushed environmental questions out of the corporate affairs function and into sourcing, packaging and logistics decisions, where they now sit alongside cost and service level as a constraint.

Treating it as a design input rather than a disclosure exercise tends to be both cheaper and more defensible.