Case Study — Adapting Demand Planning Post-Pandemic

In 2017, Orchid Orthopedic Solutions rolled out a new IBP process. 2 years into this journey, COVID hit, requiring us to take our fledgling planning process and adapt it to manage unpredictable and unprecedented supply constraints. The challenges of demand planning didn’t end as COVID eased however, as demand plans based on COVID sales data caused a backlog of orders as the market picked back up. In this article, I reveal how we responded to fluid demand in the post-pandemic environment by centering our demand planning around switching from constrained to unconstrained demand data for our forecast inputs, allowing us to provide a better demand signal to supply ...