Long Range Planning (LRP)
Build strategic plans for your organization over a longer time horizon. Forward-looking, data-backed insights so your plan is prepared for anything. Translate long-term strategy into an executable, resilient operating model.
Long Range Planning on the o9 Digital Brain enables organizations to evaluate strategic decisions over a multi-year horizon while remaining grounded in operational and financial reality. Rather than treating strategy as a qualitative exercise, LRP creates a data-driven bridge between ambition and feasibility. LRP takes a current business plan and executes on future decisions for the next 3-5 years.
Organizations use LRP to assess growth initiatives, capacity investments, network design, and sustainability commitments — understanding trade-offs and risks before committing capital.
Business challenges organizations face
Long-term strategies often fail not because the vision is wrong, but because the path to execution is unclear or unrealistic. Strategic targets are set without sufficient understanding of capacity constraints, supplier limitations, capital requirements, or network complexity. As a result, organizations find themselves reacting later with expedited investments, compromised service, or missed commitments.
This challenge is compounded by volatility. Macroeconomic shifts, geopolitical uncertainty, commodity price fluctuations, and regulatory change can quickly invalidate assumptions made years in advance. When long-range plans are built in spreadsheets and revisited infrequently, they become brittle — providing false confidence rather than guidance.
Modern Long Range Planning addresses these challenges by embedding operational and financial constraints directly into strategic evaluation. It allows organizations to stress-test ambition, quantify risk, and understand what it will truly take to deliver on long-term goals.
From Aspirational Strategy to Executable Roadmaps
Leading organizations are moving away from static, once-a-year strategic plans toward continuously evaluated strategic roadmaps. Instead of locking assumptions for multiple years, they revisit scenarios as conditions change — without starting from scratch.
In this model, LRP becomes the bridge between strategy and execution. Strategic choices flow into mid-term planning and annual targets, while feedback from execution informs long-term assumptions. This ensures that strategy remains connected to reality and evolves as the business evolves.
What this solution enables
End-to-end supply chain planning for the futureUse the end-to-end supply chain network to review the overall supply chain including Potential Constraints, Network Design, CapEx, Product Portfolio, Cost-to-Serve, Inventory Costs, and impacts of contract manufacturing on different scenarios.
Strategic Network and Capacity Modeling
o9 enables organizations to model manufacturing footprints, supplier networks, distribution structures, and capacity investments over a multi-year horizon. Leaders can evaluate trade-offs between cost, service, resilience, and sustainability before committing capital.
Growth Driver and Investment Modeling
LRP models the impact of growth initiatives such as new product introductions, market expansion, acquisitions, and divestments. These initiatives are evaluated not only for revenue potential, but also for their implications on capacity, inventory, cost structure, and capital requirements.
Macro-Scenario Stress Testing
Strategies can be stress-tested against a range of macroeconomic and geopolitical scenarios. Organizations can assess how inflation, commodity volatility, regulatory changes, or demand uncertainty would affect long-term outcomes, enabling more resilient planning.
What Makes o9 Different
Integrated Planning Horizons
LRP in o9 is not an isolated strategic model. It connects directly to Digital IBP, S&OP, and AOP, ensuring continuity from long-term ambition through mid-term planning and annual execution.
Flexible Scenario Management
Unlike spreadsheet-based approaches that require rebuilding models for every scenario, o9 allows teams to generate, compare, and iterate scenarios dynamically — dramatically reducing effort and increasing insight.
Prescriptive Growth Drivers
Identify and synthesize the growth drivers that will deliver your desired business goals.
Investment in Detail
Review breakdown of investment in inventory, flex consumption, increase in alternates, and the contribution margin on any time scale.
Action Planning
Eradicate supply chain constraints, excess capacity and inventory, demand and supply shaping action plan and line them up with long-term goals.
Strategize with LRP
Observe demand or supply changes, P&L impacts along with Top NPI, Marketing and Sales initiative visibility for strategic management.
Full Visibility
Gain visibility to biggest performance, forecast gaps, assumptions behind forecasts, plans, and gap closure proposals over longer time horizons. LRP quantifies the capital, inventory, and capacity investments required to achieve strategic goals. Leaders understand not just what is possible, but what it will cost and what risks are involved.
Industries Supported
Powered by the o9 Digital Brain
Sales & Operations Planning runs on the o9 Digital Brain, powered by the Enterprise Knowledge Graph (EKG). The EKG models relationships across products, customers, locations, resources, and financial structures, creating a digital twin of the planning environment.
This architecture enables fluid aggregation and disaggregation, allowing executives to plan at an enterprise level while planners validate feasibility at detailed levels — all within the same model.
Modular by design, enterprise by default
o9 accelerates S&OP deployment through modular building blocks that establish core data models, workflows, and governance. These include demand planning, supply and capacity planning, inventory modeling, and financial reconciliation, all operating on a shared foundation.
Organizations can adopt these capabilities incrementally while maintaining alignment with broader IBP objectives.
Core Building Blocks
These foundational components establish shared data, network visibility, and collaborative workflows across the supplier ecosystem.
Advanced Building Blocks
These components apply AI and automation to turn collaboration into proactive orchestration and resilience.
A digital operating model for VUCA conditions
APEX is o9’s AI-powered operating model for enterprises navigating volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). It enables organizations to plan, execute, and learn as one connected system.
The o9 Digital Brain powers APEX by connecting enterprise data, knowledge, and decisions through a single intelligent model.
Collaborative Demand Planning is one of the building blocks of the Digital Brain. It contributes domain-specific capabilities into the enterprise-wide model that enables APEX from the ground up—linking this solution to decisions across the entire value chain.
→ Learn how the APEX Operating Model works
Where AI drives real decisions
Artificial intelligence enhances LRP by expanding the range and quality of scenarios organizations can evaluate.
Machine learning models incorporate external market signals, macroeconomic indicators, and historical trends to inform long-term demand assumptions.
Probabilistic forecasting generates demand ranges rather than single-point estimates, allowing leaders to understand uncertainty and risk.
AI-driven analysis highlights the key drivers and constraints shaping long-term outcomes, focusing attention where it matters most.
Generative AI enables natural-language exploration of strategic scenarios, allowing executives to ask questions, compare options, and document rationale directly within the planning environment.
→ Learn more about o9 AI innovations
Results in real-world complexity
Global organizations across consumer products, manufacturing, and distribution have modernized S&OP using o9. Companies have improved forecast accuracy, reduced inventory buffers, shortened planning cycles, and increased planner productivity. Most importantly, they have transformed S&OP into a forum for decisions rather than debate.
What our customers say
“So with IBP, what we are achieving now is one single source of truth. Everyone aligns behind one number, with the ultimate accountability for IBP being the general manager. So you take the power out of the functions and give it to the general manager to run the business as they see fit, which is unbelievable.”
Dr. Athina Kanioura
Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer
Related solutions
Long Range Planning (LRP)
Collaborative Demand Planning
Collaborative Demand Planning on the o9 Digital Brain enables cross-functional teams to co-create, reconcile, and commit to a single, transparent demand plan, powered by shared assumptions, real-time collaboration, and AI-driven automation.
Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization (MEIO)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Long Range Planning embeds operational and financial constraints directly into strategic evaluation, ensuring long-term plans are executable.