The next Demand or Supply Planner you hire will spend roughly 60% of the week on data reconciliation and rebuild work that the system below them should be doing. The audit measures exactly where those hours land in your operation, and what would change if the mechanical work moved above the ERP.
The ERP has clean data, governance, and audit trails. The planning function does not. A planner pulls extracts into a spreadsheet, rebuilds the model on every cycle, layers in overrides that no one documents, and emails the result around for approval. The next planner you hire is meant to fix this. They typically inherit the same split.1
Below is a representative log of one mid-market F&B planner's week. Names redacted. Timings observed over a four-week diary study during a previous audit. The right column classifies each block as mechanical (work the system should be doing) or strategic (work that should be the planner's job).
The commercial call, the launch scenario, the director check-in — what the role exists for. Everything else is the system below failing upward into the planner's calendar.
Data reconciliation, forecast rebuild, override docs, exception chase, status reporting, tool maintenance. The audit names each by hours.
The pattern holds across SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Dynamics, Infor. The gap between the ERP and the planning function is.
The audit is a structured 45-minute call followed by a written 3-page diagnostic. Founder-delivered, free, useful regardless of whether you become a customer. We ask the same three questions every time.
We walk through a representative cycle, block by block. The deliverable includes the mechanical / strategic split for your team, with the six mechanical sub-categories sized.
Override rationale, scenario assumptions, exception handling. We name the channels (Excel, Slack, email, conversation) and the consequence of each loss.
Stratified by SKU tier, channel, and day type. Most teams have bias they have not measured. The diagnostic names it and estimates margin impact.
The team ran SAP S/4 for the ERP and Excel for planning. Two planners spent four to six hours per cycle rebuilding spreadsheet models against the ERP. Forecast bias on top-200 SKUs was systematic and unaudited.
We deployed the planning layer above their existing stack. No migration. No data project. The ERP did not change. Ten weeks later: reconciliation under fifteen minutes per cycle, forecast accuracy on top-200 SKUs up eighteen points, OTIF in the low-90s.
One of the founders will respond within two business days with available 45-minute slots and a short note on what to have ready. If we are not the right fit, we will say so.