At a global home appliance manufacturer, a planning cycle that once took 55 hours now takes minutes. A global MedTech company's baseline forecast went from five days to one day, saving 960 hours of work each month. At a global electronics manufacturer, customer fulfillment rose from 80 percent to nearly 100 percent, while inventory carrying costs fell.
These are the results a CSCO wants to bring back to the boardroom. But let’s rewind the tape to the original C-suite asks behind these outcomes, before the challenging work across field operations, planners, workflows, and data made the results possible.
Board meetings have a gravitational pull on any C-suite calendar. CxOs and their teams spend hours and burn through heaps of tokens to refine a single bullet into a signal the board can act on. Yet the feedback and direction these leaders receive can still feel broad: improve forecast accuracy, reduce planning time and effort, and grow without excessive inventory.
These are fair expectations. The board is right to set the economics without prescribing forecasting logic or an inventory policy. But a CSCO has to determine which decisions underlie the ask, who makes them, and what information each person needs. That’s when the walk from the boardroom back to the team can start to feel like walking the plank.
Spaulding Ridge has a proven framework for addressing that gap. It connects business signals to the decisions they should influence, the actions that follow, and a measure of whether the response worked. When executive leadership detects shifting supply chain conditions, it clarifies the next decision and supports action.
Three examples of the decision gaps this framework addresses:
The Ask of the CSCO: A Single Source of Truth for Planning
When the Board asks for a real-time view of demand and production, the real ask of the CSCO is to understand where time is being spent.
For example, at an appliance manufacturer, the company managed commercial assumptions and production constraints in separate, disconnected planning processes. A pricing change or promotion could alter demand, but the supply plan still had to reflect what production could deliver. With each nuance in product, pricing, and promotion plans feeding into the demand forecast, which in turn had to reach supply planning, the time loss could multiply.
Spaulding Ridge connected those processes by identifying which assumptions needed to be shared across teams and then built those handoffs into the planning process. As a result, the planning cycle dropped from 55 hours to minutes, and the team established a single connected planning model. Forecast accuracy also improved by 25 percent over two years, with more time for analysis and less time spent relaying data.
The Ask of the CSCO: Forecast Automation Without Losing the Human in the Loop
When every business unit uses its own forecasting approach, the CSCO must decide what to include in a common baseline and where local judgment should apply.
For example, at one MedTech company, teams were using three tools and a dozen approaches to planning. Spaulding Ridge helped establish a common baseline and a consistent way for planners to incorporate upcoming business events into the demand plan. Planners could start with the same forecast, review it, make an explainable adjustment, and track the outcome the next period.
Baseline forecasting time fell from five days to one, and the process saved 960 hours of work each month. Forecast error, measured by mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), improved by 15 points compared with the prior system and by two points compared with the previous planner consensus. This gives planners time to focus on the business events that might influence demand and provides a common way to evaluate the upside or downside they add.
The Ask of the CSCO: Improved Fulfillment Without Excessive Inventory
Spare and procured parts can quickly become excess inventory when they aren’t planned in a connected environment. It is the CSCO’s role to develop workflows that strike this balance for executive leadership.
For example, at a global electronics manufacturer, teams planned parts and finished goods in silos, relying on separate forecasts and manual handoffs. Spaulding Ridge started with the data those teams needed to trust, then built a common planning workflow for parts and finished goods. That changed what planners could do when an exception occurred, such as a demand spike or a supplier delay.
Now the team can assess these events against the plan and compare orders with fulfillment before adjusting inventory. With the signal now reaching the people who can decide how to respond, the team can prevent stockouts and obsolescence more easily.
As a result, customer fulfillment rose from 80 percent to nearly 100 percent, and inventory carrying costs fell. That same visibility proved useful when tariffs created a new risk, enabling leaders to identify exposed inventory in transit within hours rather than weeks.
Supply Chain Outcomes Rely on Connected Decisions
Spaulding Ridge brings together operator-level domain advisors and enterprise engineers to help supply chain leaders ask the right questions and make the choices that lead to outcomes like those above. The difference between a boardroom target and the next operating plan is a healthy partnership among advisory, engineering, and the value that can be derived from the underlying technology.
The walk back from the boardroom can be lonely without a collaborative team to position the pieces for a supply chain transformation. Spaulding Ridge partners with CSCOs and supply chain leaders to go beyond the boardroom ask and prioritize decisions that connect across the enterprise. This enables leaders to return to the board with measurable results aligned with the outcomes they were asked to deliver.