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Every supply chain leader knows forecasts are built, debated, refined.
A “final number” emerges, and the organization rallies around it. Production schedules are set, inventory is positioned, budgets are locked.
But reality has other plans, a promotion runs hotter than expected, shipments get delayed, the machine breaks, and the list goes on and on.
Suddenly, the carefully constructed number is wrong, probably a few hours after achieving it.
The plan doesn’t adapt - it snaps, it's not longer relevant.
Teams do what they can, firefighting replaces execution, and the credibility of planning itself takes a hit.
This isn’t about bad planners or poor tools. It’s about the flaw baked into the concept.
Single-number planning assumes the future can be foreseen and reduced to one outcome. In volatile markets, that assumption fails again and again.
A single line across time assumes certainty - that demand or supply will neatly follow that path. But reality behaves differently.
The further you look into the future, the more possibilities open up.
What looks like a simple forecast line is actually one option out of many, thousands of possibilities - an ocean of possible outcomes.
When planners pick one number from that curve, they commit to a fiction. And when reality veers outside that line, the plan collapses.
This brittle approach has real costs:
Most organizations respond by tightening their process -more frequent re-forecasts, more detailed models, more meetings (and more opinions).
But this is treating the symptom, not the cause. The underlying flaw remains: betting on one number.
RBP takes uncertainty as the starting point. Instead of betting on one number, it builds corridors of plausible outcomes and ties each to clear response policies.
This is a mindset shift.
For years, planners have been judged by forecast accuracy.
Did we hit the number?
That culture trains people to obsess over precision in a single outcome.
Let change the questions we ask:
This mindset frees teams to focus on decision quality instead of defending a number.
It makes planning less about prediction and more about preparation.
Volatility isn’t going away. If anything, it’s accelerating, hard geopolitical environment, climate change, aging machine and a new generation of buyers.
The cost of brittle, single-number planning is compounding. Leaders can no longer afford to treat disruptions as exceptions, doing so will have devastating implications on profit.
Range-Based Planning meets this reality head-on.
By designing plans that flex across corridors and being able to react fast, organizations stop being surprised by the inevitable.
They shift from firefighting to forward-looking, from fragile to antifragile.
In other words: fewer wasted hours, fewer stockouts, fewer dollars lost to volatility.
The future won’t fit into a single number. Let's stop chasing accuracy, it's an illusion.
Range-Based Planning isn’t about being perfectly right. It’s about being prepared for the range of what’s plausible - and thriving within it.
Hexight provides the platform for ranged based planning, reach out to see a new, easy and fast approach to face reality and thrive.
