In cascaded supply chain planning, planners focus on achieving functional excellence in their own specific area of supply chain planning, such as inventory or capacity planning. This involves isolating that one area, fine-tuning it and then excelling at it. On the surface, this siloed approach would seem ideal for creating a system that operates at peak efficiency from one end of the supply chain to the other. But this is not the case. Between each function, misalignment compounds and contributes to operational blindness. Optimizing for capacity planning alone without an understanding of its impact on inventory, for example, creates challenges that compound as plans circulate throughout the rest of the network. With each function prioritizing its own performance, collaboration, efficiency and responsiveness decline. Opportunities are lost, and broader business objectives are jeopardized. Organizations that practice cascaded planning often don’t think of the supply chain as an end-to-end system, despite the fact that it’s the functional silos that are making it impossible to get a complete view of the supply chain. Working in this environment, supply chain planners too often spend their days repeatedly managing the side effects of this approach and not tackling the central problem. Overall, cascaded planning is slow, largely manual and error prone. And because it doesn’t give planners real-time access to the data they need from other areas of the supply chain, it severely limits their ability to react quickly to mitigate the impact of unexpected changes or events.