Discover where deployments quietly fail and how senior leaders can keep them on track
The demand-driven operating model is proven. The harder question is whether it survives contact with your organization — the operations leaders whose careers were built on MRP, the planners measured on forecast accuracy for decades, and the local customizations that have quietly hardened around the old way of working.
This brief, the fourth in Algo’s four-part series on supply chain operating model design, is written for the senior leaders who sponsor that deployment. It names the resistance you should expect in three specific places, and the practices that separate sponsors who see the change through from those who let it drift — including a new pressure AI-assisted “vibe coding” is putting on legacy customizations.
- Confront the MRP Orthodoxy: Engage the senior leaders whose expertise and identity were built inside forecast-driven planning — individually, early, and with the technical fluency to tell a real design objection from resistance in disguise.
- Develop Planner Acceptance: Address the group with the most legitimate concerns head-on, through five concrete commitments — transparency on workforce impact, a rebranded role, explainable logic, real involvement in configuration, and early wins.
- Override the Local Customizations including the AI-Built Ones: Set the standard operating model as the baseline, put exceptions through executive review, and hold AI-generated workarounds to the same bar as any other: does it serve the model, or just make the old one faster to hide?