Insights
Not thought leadership. These are the three positions I find myself arguing most often, written down so I can stop re-explaining them — and so you can decide whether you disagree before we ever get on a call.
Every planning improvement program starts by measuring forecast error and setting a target to reduce it. Most of them should start somewhere else. The forecast is rarely the binding constraint — the number of people permitted to change it is, and nobody measures that.
Planning orthodoxy treats "how much" as the hard question and "where" as an afterthought handled by an allocation rule. With freight where it is, that ordering is backwards — and it stays backwards because the person who decides how much usually doesn't own what it costs to move.
The items you stock out of are recorded as items customers didn't want. Your forecast learns from that record and recommends buying less of them. Your fill rate improves because the shortfall never reached an order line. This loop is running in almost every company I've looked at.
Next step
That's a better first conversation than a capabilities overview. Tell me which one and why.