The attendee list on Microsoft Teams kept growing.
Every few seconds another senior leader joined the meeting.
Commercial Directors.
Operations Directors.
Regional Leaders.
People I'd only recently met since joining the business.
As I watched the names appear, I felt that familiar knot in my stomach.
It reminded me of the supplier phone call I wrote about in my first Signal.
Different role.
Different responsibility.
Exactly the same feeling.
By this point I was several years into my career, working for a global chemical manufacturer, and I'd been handed responsibility for leading the Regional S&OP process across EMEA.
It was the most senior audience I'd presented to.
I didn't want to let anyone down.
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When I accepted the role, I thought I knew what I was walking into.
Between accepting the offer and my first day, the business merged with another company.
The organisation changed.
The department changed.
The role changed.
Almost overnight, I found myself responsible for coordinating the Regional S&OP process across multiple manufacturing sites.
The process itself was already well established.
I inherited the presentation deck from the previous team with one simple instruction.
"Carry it on."
So I did.
For the first few months, I concentrated on learning the business.
Every month started with a Demand Review. My planning team translated the latest demand plan into production plans, and I consolidated everything into the executive S&OP presentation.
The deck was substantial.
An executive summary with close to twenty KPIs.
Detailed production plans for every manufacturing site.
Inventory.
Service levels.
Forecast accuracy.
Capacity.
Utilisation.
Page after page of information.
Before every meeting, I spent hours preparing.
Not because anyone expected perfection.
Because I didn't want to be caught out.
I wanted to understand every chart.
Every movement.
Every exception.
If someone challenged a number, I wanted to understand the business behind it, not just the metric itself.
---
Eventually, everyone had joined.
"Is that everybody?"
Silence.
"Okay... let's get started."
I opened the executive summary and began working through the numbers.
Service levels.
Inventory.
Forecast accuracy.
Production volumes.
Month on month comparisons.
Some metrics immediately sparked discussion.
Others barely received a second glance.
Inventory almost always generated the biggest conversation.
Following the merger, there was a clear objective to reduce inventory across the business. One month I was challenged on why our region hadn't achieved the reduction we'd planned.
The answer wasn't that we'd failed.
Demand had softened more than expected. If we'd reacted too quickly by cutting production, we'd simply have created different risks elsewhere in the supply chain.
The better decision was to replan production for the following month and reduce inventory in a controlled way.
The discussion wasn't really about stock.
It was about judgement.
How much inventory was the right amount?
How much risk was the business prepared to carry?
Those conversations mattered.
Other metrics, however, quietly occupied space in the presentation month after month without changing a single decision.
Fortunately, the preparation paid off.
When questions came, I had answers.
But after several months, I realised something.
The meeting wasn't really driving decisions.
It was creating actions.
Usually for me.
Usually for my planning team.
We'd spend days preparing reports, present them, answer questions and leave with an even longer list of follow up tasks.
At first, I assumed that was simply how S&OP worked.
After all, it was an established process.
It had been running successfully for years.
Who was I to question it?
---
Then one month we asked ourselves a different question.
Not,
"How can we improve the presentation?"
But,
"What is this meeting actually for?"
That single question changed everything.
We stopped assuming every slide deserved to stay.
We challenged every KPI.
Did anyone actually use it?
Did it influence a decision?
Did it highlight a genuine business risk?
Or had it simply survived because it had always been there?
We stripped the executive summary back to the measures that genuinely influenced executive decision-making.
Days of Inventory on Hand.
OTIF.
Production site utilisation.
Slow moving inventory.
The other metrics didn't disappear, we still reported them, but they no longer competed for attention.
If something changed the direction of the business, it deserved to be front and centre.
If it didn't, it belonged in the background.
We also removed the detailed production plans for every manufacturing site from the executive meeting.
Instead, we led with the headline.
Why wasn't a site running at full utilisation?
Was it a deliberate inventory reduction?
A maintenance shutdown?
A change in demand?
Once everyone understood the situation, the discussion naturally shifted from analysing data to making decisions.
The impact was immediate.
The meetings became shorter.
Engagement increased.
The conversations became richer.
Decisions were made faster.
Most importantly, ownership became shared.
The planning team stopped leaving every meeting carrying a longer to-do list.
The leadership team started leaving with clearer decisions.
That was what the meeting had always been intended to achieve.
---
Looking back, the biggest change wasn't the slide deck.
It was my understanding of leadership.
Early in my career, I thought my job was to know every number.
Experience taught me something different.
My job as a supply chain leader wasn't to present the business.
It was to help the business decide what to do next.
I've carried that lesson into every leadership role since.
Whenever I inherit a meeting, a report or a process, I ask myself one question.
Is this helping people make better decisions, or is it simply producing better reports?
There's a world of difference between the two.
---
The Demand Signal
Lessons from the front line of supply chain.
Theme
Leadership
Signal
Reporting tells people what happened. Leadership helps decide what happens next.
Reflection
Meetings, dashboards and reports have a habit of growing over time.
Every new KPI seems useful.
Every new slide feels justified.
Rarely does anyone ask what should be removed.
The most effective leadership meetings aren't the ones with the most information.
They're the ones that create the clearest decisions.
Question
Think about the meetings you attend most often.
Are they helping people understand the past...
...or helping them shape the future?
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The Demand Signal
Lessons from the front line of supply chain.