How to Recognize When It’s Time for a Purpose-Built Supply Chain Planning Solution
For mid-sized companies, your ERP system often started as the all-in-one business solution. It handles finance, inventory, and maybe even light demand and supply planning. But as your supply chain complexity increases, cracks in that foundation start to show.
You may not need to replace your ERP—but if you’re using it as your primary planning tool, it’s time to ask:
Is it still serving you—or are you working around it?
Here are five clear signs that your ERP isn’t enough for today’s planning challenges.
1. You’re Always Planning in Spreadsheets—Despite Having an ERP
If your team extracts data from your ERP into Excel to “actually do the planning,” that’s a red flag. It means the planning module lacks the agility, usability, or speed needed to support daily decisions.
According to Gartner, over 60% of companies using ERP-native planning rely on offline spreadsheets for scenario analysis and decision-making (Gartner, 2023).
What it costs you:
- Delayed decisions
- Version control issues
- Missed demand signals and misaligned supply
2. Your System Can’t Model ‘What-If’ Scenarios
Let’s say a supplier goes offline, a big customer cancels an order, or you need to evaluate alternate sourcing—can your ERP model that quickly?
Most ERP-native planning tools weren’t built for real-time scenario modeling. Instead, planners must rebuild data sets manually or wait on IT to run simulations. In today’s volatile environment, that lag is dangerous.
McKinsey found that companies with scenario planning capabilities were twice as likely to recover faster from supply disruptions (McKinsey, 2022).
3. You’re Reacting Instead of Planning
If your planning process feels like a never-ending loop of firefighting, late shipments, or inventory surprises, your system likely can’t support concurrent, cross-functional planning.
ERP systems tend to be transactional—great at recording what happened, not guiding what should happen.
Symptoms include:
- Short-term fixes overriding long-term strategy
- Supply chain planning disconnected from sales and finance
- No clear visibility into bottlenecks or risks until it’s too late
4. Your Business Is Growing—but the System Isn’t Keeping Up
New products, new regions, more suppliers—it’s all good news for growth, but bad news for an ERP-native planning setup.
As complexity increases, ERP planning tools often struggle with:
- Multi-site inventory balancing
- Lead time variability
- Agile demand forecasting
If your planners are saying “the system won’t let us do that,” they’re likely compensating for a lack of capability with manual workarounds.
A study by Deloitte found that 41% of supply chain leaders cite poor system flexibility as a barrier to growth (Deloitte Global CPO Survey, 2023).
5. Planners Are Working Around the System—Not With It
When your best supply chain minds are spending their time exporting, reconciling, and fixing data instead of planning, it’s a sign the system is slowing them down.
What starts as a minor workaround eventually leads to:
- Tribal knowledge silos
- Fragile manual processes
- Increased risk of human error
Productivity loss due to poor planning systems costs mid-sized companies millions annually in missed margin and inefficiencies, according to Supply Chain Quarterly (SCQ, 2023).
What’s the Alternative?
Modern planning platforms like Kinaxis Planning One or ketteQ are purpose-built to work alongside your ERP—not replace it.
They bring:
- Real-time visibility
- Automated simulations
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Cloud-based scalability without IT burden
And with a crawl-walk-run approach, you can start small, get value quickly, and expand over time.
Is It Time to Level Up?
If you recognized even two or three of the signs above, it’s worth exploring whether a modern supply chain planning solution could unlock agility, visibility, and margin for your business.
📄 Coming Soon: Planning Readiness Checklist
🗓️ Book a quick consult: How Do Mid-Sized Companies Successfully Transition from ERP Planning?
Let’s talk about what’s holding your planning process back—and how to move forward without disruption.