The Fifth Column: Getting to the Obvious Answer the Hard Way

A textbook production-planning problem at one of the world’s largest manufacturers remained unsolved for years because the organization was not yet prepared to trust and act on the model’s answers. Making infeasibilities, tradeoffs, and alternative plans legible to planners helped reduce planning cycles from weeks to hours and unlock more than 40,000 additional units annually and nearly $400 million in realized profit improvement.