Okay Chakri So can we talk about Demand Planning now? It's a core supply chain activity, and it's a core element of any digital transformation. But why is it so important? Indeed, Simon, Demand Planning is one of the most important, if not the most important planning activity of any integrated business planning capability.

And its transformation is extremely important. So to examine why, first, let's kind of establish the basics of what is Demand Planning, Why is it important, right? The supply chain of any organization is made up of many supply chain activities, and usually the lead times of the supply chain activities are such that their lead times are longer than the customer expected or the lead times. So what does that mean?

Many of the activities of the supply chain have to be planned based on an estimate of demand, i.e. a forecast. A forecast is a estimate of demand based on certain assumptions about the market and certain assumptions about commercial actions that we are willing to take. Then if you get that forecast wrong, the risk in the supply chain increases. The customers service expectations can be hit or I have to carry a lot more buffer, buffer in terms of inventory, buffer in terms of capacity to account for the fact that my forecast is not accurate.

So it's a tradeoff of customer service versus extra cost and extra inventory. And the Demand Planning is the process of first estimating the forecast under certain assumptions, working with the supply chain to estimate the risk and the cost of supporting that, and then finalizing the plan, i.e. demand plan of what we expect to sell based on the supply chains, ability to support and the cost of supporting it. So it is one of the most important activities because getting that wrong means either poor service levels or too much cost in the supply chain, both of which can have adverse impacts on the P&L.