Pyplan's Rodrigo Durán Aims to Break Silos and Make Trade-Offs Explicit: Pros to Know Award

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Hello, my name is Marina Mayer, Editor-in-Chief of Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, and I am here with Rodrigo Duran, Head of Business Development at PyPlan. Rodrigo is a recipient of this year's Pros to Know Award in the Leaders in Excellence category. Rodrigo, thank you so much for joining me today. Congratulations!

Let's talk about you, tell us a little bit about yourself, and your journey, and how you got to this current stage in your career.

Rodrigo Duran: I am an economist by background, with almost 20 years of experience working with planning, mostly across supply chain and finance. I started my career in consulting, building financial and planning models for different industries, like oil and gas, energy, consumer goods, and manufacturing, at the beginning in Latin America, and then globally.

But, with a technical focus at the beginning of my career, creating models, building accurate models, structuring data.

But then, over time, I noticed that companies, even with a good model, they were still struggling to make decisions. So, the problem wasn't really the model, it was how decisions are being made around that's where my focus shifted. I became more interested in how to connect planning with actual decision making. And today at PyPlan, that is exactly what I do. I work with leaders in the supply chain, finance, and planning teams to redefine the planning process to transform the planning from a process to a core decision-making capability in the company. That is really where I focus my work today.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: One of the things outlined in your submission is how you help organizations move from implicit assumptions to explicit economic bets. What does this mean, and why is this important?

Rodrigo Duran: This idea comes from something very simple that we see that happens in every company. Decisions usually are being made every day, but without the assumptions. The assumptions are behind those decisions, but often implicit. So, what that means, for example, when a team, defined to increase inventory to improve service, that has a cost in the working capital and the financial side.

At the same time, when a team reduced inventory to improve cash flow, for example, that generates a risk of stock outs. Those are the types of economic trade-offs. What we do is help companies to make those trade-offs explicit. We simulate different scenarios, we quantify the impact on key variables, like margin, cost, service, risk. So that is what I mean by economic bets. It's, instead of saying, this feels like the right decision, we can say, if we do this, this is the impact, and this is what we are expecting as a return.

The point here is, for doing that, companies need to build their own model, and they need to build how they understand the reality. That it’s not the simple work, but we help companies to do that, to create the model, how they understand their own business, how variables are impacting their business, what variables matter, what the trade-offs are real, and what success actually means.

That's why we think that making this trade-off explicit and talking about economic bets helps companies to understand better the business and make better decisions.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Also outlined in your application is how you helped more than 80 organizations rethink planning as a decision-making capability that tightly aligns supply chain planning and financial planning. How have you seen supply chain planning evolve over the years, and what should companies be doing now to prepare?

Rodrigo Duran: I think if we look how planning has evolved, there are a few states, where, at the beginning, it was very functional. Demand planning was separate from supply planning. Finance was separate. Most of the work was done in spreadsheets.

And then we have a second stage, when companies started implementing SNOP processes, SN operations planning, to improve alignment between functions, mainly sales and operations, and that was a big step forward, but still very process-driven. We think that now we are entering in a new stage. Planning is becoming a decision-making system. And that means that the focus changes. Instead of what is the plan, the focus is now what are the options? What is the best option? What is the best decision that we can make? For that, we think we need to integrate supply chain with finance. We need to work with scenarios instead of static plans. We need to use analytics and AI in order to evaluate trade-offs. So, in other words, I think planning now is evolving from managing data, or from a reporting process, to building and operating a model of reality, and that model is the foundation for every decision.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: Over the next 12 months, your focus is on advancing better supply chain planning and financial decision-making across global organizations. Walk us through the benefits of better supply chain planning, especially in a day like today when disruptions happen every minute.

Rodrigo Duran: Every day. The benefits are quite broad, right? But we usually group these benefits into three areas.

First is decision quality. When companies can understand the impact, before the YAC changed not only the speed, but also the confidence of decision-making.

So first is, decision quality. Second, could be efficiency. A lot of planning teams still spend a huge amount of time preparing data, consolidating data manually or on spreadsheets, checking consistency. And when we move to an integrated approach, a lot of that work is automated. So teams can focus more on analysis instead of data preparation.

And third, you'd say performance. We have seen companies with better service levels, with a reduction in stockouts, with better or stronger financial outcomes.

But I would add a fourth benefit, that is very important, that is alignment. When we have supply chain, finance, planning, sales teams working on the same model, in the same assumptions, on the same scenarios, we eliminate a lot of frictions. That means that decisions become faster, more clear and more consistent across the organization.

And also with that, sharing the same model. We are improving how companies learn. So, it's not just about efficiency and performance, but it's more strategic impact. It's how they improve and how they learn, once we have the plan, we have the outcomes, and we can refine the model in order to make better decisions over time.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: The Leaders in Excellence category honors company leaders who've made outstanding contributions to the supply chain space. What advice do you have for other professionals in supply chain?

Rodrigo Duran: I think the biggest shift professionals need to make is stop thinking of planning as a process, but start thinking in planning as a decision capability. We need to first make trade-offs explicit. That means we need to understand the economic impact of every decision, of our decisions, because if not, we are operating with blind spots.

Second, break silos. Supply chain, finance, operations need to work on the same business logic. That means not just alignment in meetings, that means sharing the same understanding of the business.

And third, I say use technology in the right way. We are in the analytics and AI era. And those powerful tools allows us to make better decisions, but they should support human judgment and not replace it. At the end of the day, decisions are still made by humans, by people, so the role of technology is to make those decisions better, faster, and more informed. So, those would be my advices for professionals in this field of supply chain.

Supply & Demand Chain Executive: What is something we haven't addressed so far that would be important, a good takeaway for our audience?

Rodrigo Duran: I think looking forward, I am very excited because I think there is a big opportunity embedding these new capabilities, like analytics and AI simulation, AI, into every decision-making. The challenge is include these capabilities not as something separate, but as part of how companies operate daily.

Maybe soon platforms will make these capabilities available to everyone.

But platforms don't create understanding, and understanding comes from how a company models its own reality, how it defines trade-offs, how it incorporates feedback, how it learns from outcomes.

I think that is where the next level of competitive advantage will come from. Because the companies that will perform better, I think, are not the ones with more data, but the ones that can turn that data into better decisions, but consistently.