Data Powers Orchestration: How COOs Can Shrink Signal to Response in Planning 

Volatility has collapsed planning horizons, but most operations still rely on fragmented signals, delayed handoffs, and manual decision-making across functions. New Zero100 survey data suggests that COOs are building orchestration by combining AI-enabled planning, unified data foundations, and redesigned business processes to compress the time from signal to response across end-to-end operations.

Continuous Planning is the endgame.

What Is Orchestration?

COOs have a comprehensive view of end-to-end operations. In fact, according to data from our recent survey of 100 COOs, most have at least dotted-line accountability for both supply- and demand-side functions. And yet, the most common reporting structures have COOs only indirectly responsible for critical customer-facing duties, including channel operations (60%) and customer service (45%).  

This means COOs spend a lot of their time orchestrating data and decisions to deliver on the strategic and tactical goals of the business. In practice, this means reconciling operating data from various systems that aren’t integrated and don’t share a consistent ontology. Our definition of orchestration in this context is: the ability to connect the enterprise end-to-end, linking signals, decisions, and actions across functions, systems, and partners so the organization moves as one.

More simply, orchestration is making data-driven decisions in huge volumes, and at full speed across the entire business.

What’s Wrong with Planning Today?

If orchestration aspires to deliver zero-latency between data-informed planning and execution, then what’s happening in the typical S&OP or IBP process today? The answer, to hijack an anonymous but representative example from one apparel manufacturer, was a two-week-long process of reconciliation between different forecasts, sourcing plans, and inventory levels with business unit presidents making the ultimate call on how much product goes where. Confidence in the data was low, acceptance of decisions more forced than agreed upon, and reality immediately diverged from the plan every time.

The weaknesses in this case included process flaws, organizational barriers, and poor planning tools, but the main culprit was bad data. Some improvement came with a master data effort supporting an ERP upgrade, but real breakthroughs will require a move to Continuous Planning enabled by AI agents doing more of the human work collecting, normalizing, and analyzing the data.

Cisco runs such a system. Spanning 10,000+ products, thousands of models, and millions of interactions, no traditional monolithic forecasting system could keep up. So, Cisco rebuilt the architecture as a multi-agent orchestration layer comprising:

• Data Prep Agents – continuously clean, validate, and enrich inputs 
• Model Selection Agents – dynamically choose the best algorithm for each context
• Explainability Agents – translate outputs into human-readable reasoning
• Forecast Orchestrator Agent – keeps the entire forecasting system continuously refreshed and aligned
  

In Cisco’s case, the data is cleaned autonomously by agents before being normalized, analyzed, and applied to decision making by humans. This is faster and more scalable than traditional planning, but also more trust-building because the starting point is better data.

COOs Need to Own the Data Challenge

Data discipline is critical in an AI-powered world, but there is no place this matters more than in planning. And yet, only 50% of COOs directly own planning. This means that in half of organizations planning (and product portfolio management) is directly controlled by some other function, typically finance or commercial leadership. This must change.

Shrinking the time between signal and response – whether from a customer, a disruption in supply, or a competitive challenge in the marketplace – is vital to any business’s ability to grow enterprise value. Thousands of tradeoffs are made daily by business leaders trying to balance short term with long term, standards with exceptions, customer promises with operational constraints – every single one depends on high-quality data.

COOs, who in 90% of organizations own or have dotted-line accountability for technology, are ideally positioned to own the data challenge end-to-end. 

Continuous Planning Is the Next Frontier

The grip of slow, sequential planning is being broken by AI, and COOs are leading the way. Bonnie Fetch, EVP and President of Operations for Cummins, crystallizes it well in the foreword for our upcoming report about the COO’s role: “In five years, the COOs who thrive will have shifted from 'Chief of Process and Execution' to 'Chief of Adaptability' – fluent in operational excellence and strategic orchestration, data, and culture."