In our hyperconnected world, disruptive forces are everywhere and accelerating: The pace of innovation is quickening while new digital capabilities are fueling innovative business models and customer-centric services. These technologies are serving as both disruptors and catalysts for industry change.

To survive amid all the disruption – and even harness it for a competitive edge – planners need to adapt and adjust faster. And that requires a better planning process, one that is extremely agile, allowing you to adjust in real time to rapidly changing business conditions. Today, like never before, planning and execution must be tightly integrated.

But a surprising number of companies are lagging. In a recent benchmark study*, only 55% of businesses surveyed had a "modestly integrated planning process across the company," and a mere 9% said they had a "highly-integrated supply chain planning environment."

Not that companies aren't trying to better integrate planning and execution. There's also no shortage of tools out there to help with different parts of the process, from sales and operations planning to materials planning and more. More often than not, though, you'll see planners juggling a mountain of spreadsheets and scrambling to pull data from multiple systems.