Acting Quickly Matters but So Does Acting on the Right Signal: 5 Steps to True Demand Visibility

Kelly Coutinho

Karishma Jobanputra

June 05, 2026 • 6 min read

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In many conversations with customers over the last month, the same challenge has kept surfacing — how do we get closer to real demand? How do we know what we are missing? What signals should we be acting on? These all point to the same underlying question: which signals have earned the right to change the plan?

Zooming out, our recent research reveals that competitive advantage comes from end-to-end AI-enabled workflows (aka PowerThreads). Five PowerThreads capture 95% of where companies are investing, and one of them is Signal-to-Plan. This is a system where demand signals, supply constraints, and market intelligence flow into planning models in real time, and decisions update accordingly.  

In a world where 61% of organizations still update plans reactively and only the tech industry is noticeably able to react to market conditions in real time, it’s unsurprising that there’s a focus on the “Signal” part of this PowerThread. It’s where this critical workflow begins. 

Most organizations are already drowning in signals, so the hurdle here is not about data collection but true demand visibility. In other words, the gap between:  

• what the systems captured (reveals expected demand but misses, for example, the demand that never becomes an order, such as when distributors stop ordering because they’re working through excess inventory while your systems show everything as stable); and 
• what was actually happening downstream (a grounded understanding of what the market is doing, including shifts that have not yet appeared in orders, demand distorted by service constraints, and demand that never surfaces cleanly in enterprise systems at all). 

Closing the gap requires answering five questions, in order. 

1. What kind of signal are we looking at? 

Different types of signals – transaction, behavioral, constraint, network – hold different weight depending on your business model. This is where the B2B context deserves particular attention. In B2B-heavy environments (and most manufacturers sit here even if they do not always frame it that way), demand distortion happens upstream before it ever reaches your systems. Orders get smoothed, delayed, or inflated. Service failures change customer behavior in ways that do not show up cleanly as lost orders, but as silence. In this context, OTIF tells you whether you shipped on time, but it tells you nothing about how much demand you missed, which is usually the more important question. 

2. How much evidence do we have? 

A signal is not important simply because it exists. It must demonstrate enough density, consistency, and recurrence to justify attention. One account behaving differently is interesting. Ten accounts behaving differently may be meaningful.  

For instance, a demand planner at a large CPG company described seeing a sharp drop in orders from three regional distributors in the same week. Taken alone, each looked like a local anomaly. But taken together, and confirmed against sell-through data the following week, it was the first visible sign of a broader softening in that category that their forecast had not yet captured.  

The best organizations are constantly validating precisely because the difference between a pattern and a coincidence is rarely obvious in the moment. They are also clear on what validation is for: not to confirm what is happening, but to reach the point where they can do something about it. Sensing tells you the market has moved. It is the evidence threshold that determines whether you have enough to shape a response. 

3. Is the signal statistically meaningful? 

This is where demand sensing most commonly breaks down. Density asks whether enough sources are showing the same thing, but significance asks whether what they are showing is unusual.  

Every category, customer, and planning horizon has its own natural rhythm of variation, and a movement that looks dramatic in one context may fall well within the expected range in another. The strongest organizations have absolute clarity on where that “line of normal” sits, and they do not move it when the pressure to act becomes uncomfortable. 

4. Who owns the response? 

Good signals are identified every day in organizations that still do not act on them because ownership is unclear. Everyone is informed but nobody is accountable.   

Signal visibility without decision ownership produces awareness without action, and the critical question is about who has both the authority and responsibility to respond. That needs to be made explicit in the operating model itself: named by role, documented by signal type, and reviewed when planning cycles change. Without that, even the best signal governance framework produces informed bystanders rather than decisive action. 

5. How far should the signal travel? 

Even when a signal is valid and owned, it does not automatically belong everywhere in the planning system. Some signals should influence only short-term deployment decisions while others should trigger tactical inventory adjustments. Only the strongest signals should alter supplier commitments, network decisions, or strategic planning assumptions. The more important capability is the deliberate design of propagation rules — which signals are permitted to travel how far, under what conditions, and with whose sign-off. That is a planning architecture problem. 

The science here is the framework: signal classification, evidence density, statistical thresholds, and propagation rules. The art is the discipline to hold the line on those thresholds when pressure mounts, and the judgment to act on a signal that has not yet fully declared itself but almost certainly will. 

From Visibility to Authority 

As markets move faster, signals are multiplied, and decision cycles compress, the organizations that win will be those that can convert signals into decisions, decisions into coordination, and coordination into action faster than everyone else. 

True demand visibility is a critical first step to achieving that.