Most manufacturers have invested heavily in supply chain planning. S&OP processes, ERP systems, forecasting tools, dedicated planning teams. And yet, disruptions keep hitting the factory floor in ways that feel impossible to get ahead of.
In our most recent webinar in our Supply Planning Expert Exchange series, Suzanne Maddux, VP of Supply Chain at Mercury Systems, joined to pressure test a new set of research findings against real operational experience. Suzanne's career spans aerospace and defense at both Raytheon and Mercury, with roughly equal time in operations and supply chain leadership. The conversation was grounded, practical, and honest about the challenges most teams face daily..
Here's what the data showed, and what Suzanne had to say about it.
The failure isn't happening in planning. It's happening at execution.
LeanDNA commissioned a Wakefield Research study in 2026 that surveyed 200 manufacturing and supply chain leaders. The first finding cuts right to the core issue: 75% of manufacturing leaders say supply plan failures happen at the factory execution stage, not in planning. And 83% say supplier changes cause multiple production disruptions every quarter. For more than half, that's a monthly occurrence.
Suzanne wasn't surprised by the numbers. But she was quick to challenge how leaders interpret them. The problem isn't that organizations aren't investing in planning. It's that they're still running management systems that ask backward-looking questions.
"You can invest in planning tools that tell you ‘we predict this is going to be a problem’," she said, "and if you drive a management system that every morning says, ‘come in and tell me what you're short today’, you are already discounting the systems and tools that you've invested in."
If every leadership conversation starts with what went wrong yesterday, no tool can shift a team into proactive mode.
By the time most teams identify a disruption, it's already too late.
The research reinforces this pattern. 72% of manufacturers experienced a material shortage in the past year that wasn't discovered until delays were unavoidable.
The issue isn't that disruptions occur. It's that the window to respond has already closed by the time the team is aware of the problem. Suzanne sees this play out most often when leaders set rigid time fences, requiring teams to look out 6 or 18 months, without accounting for how long it actually takes to recover from different types of disruptions.
Her advice is more practical than prescriptive. Instead of chasing a fixed forecast horizon, figure out your organization's actual recovery time for a given disruption type and build that window into the system. "You're not trying to be perfect in predicting," she said. "I really just need quick reaction time and thoughtful planning around system triggers to give us enough time."
Reaction mode is expensive, and most teams don't fully see the cost.
The downstream impact of late detection and slow response is substantial. 64% of discrete manufacturers spend 10% or more of their budget reacting to disruptions. More than half take a week or longer to decide on corrective action after identifying a risk. Only 9% can respond the same day.
Zooming out further, nearly half of manufacturers say 10% or more of their annual revenue is lost or at risk due to supply-planning misalignment. Not a single survey respondent reported zero impact.
Suzanne's concern isn't the cost itself. It's that most teams can't actually trace the impact of their decisions back to the business. They expedite without knowing what it's costing. They miss the cash implications of payment term changes. They make calls that affect margins without realizing it.
"It's not that expedite costs are bad," she said. "It's blindly paying expedite costs. It's being blind to payment terms and not understanding at all the cash position that the company is in. So it's that naivety and blindness to the impact that concerns me the most."
Her recommendation for leaders: bring the financial lens into everyday conversations on the floor. When a disruption happens, ask what it did to margins, to cash, to revenue. Once team members start seeing the connection between their decisions and the business outcomes that leadership actually cares about, they make better calls.
AI confidence is high. Readiness is not.
The last research finding discussed captures a gap that a lot of manufacturers are sitting inside right now. 92% of manufacturing leaders say their leadership is confident AI can help resolve supply-planning misalignment. At the same time, only 19% have successfully digitized their manufacturing and supply chain operations.
That's a significant mismatch between expectation and foundation.
Suzanne has been working through this firsthand with LeanDNA's platform, APEX, at Mercury. She's seen real wins, particularly in getting cross-functional teams to stop arguing over whose data is right and start focusing on what to do next.
"It's not anybody's data," she said. "The system's doing the work for you. It's telling you how you can make the biggest impact the fastest."
But she was equally candid about the friction. Some of her team members described colleagues who use AI as "cheating." That kind of cultural resistance doesn't go away on its own. It has to be addressed directly.
Her guidance to leaders: be explicit about what you're measuring. If you hold people accountable for arriving at the right answer on their own, they'll avoid the tools. If you shift the measure to speed of resolution, they'll embrace them. The goal is decisions made faster, not decisions made independently.
What leading teams do differently.
The conversation closed on a practical note. What separates teams that stay ahead from those that stay stuck in reaction mode comes down to three things:
- Identifying risk earlier,
- Prioritizing what matters most to production
- Aligning around impact rather than tasks
That last point is where a lot of teams struggle. It's one thing to surface the right data. It's another to build a shared decision-making framework so the team knows what to do with it. That's what APEX by LeanDNA is built for: bringing together supply, demand, and supplier signals, surfacing what matters most each day, and helping teams act before problems become unavoidable.
The goal, as LeanDNA’s CMO Jordan Slabaugh put it, isn't to improve the plan. It's to improve how decisions get made at the point of execution. That's where the gap lives, and based on the data and on Suzanne's experience, it's where the opportunity is too.
Missed the live session? The recording is available on demand. And if you want to see how APEX helps teams get ahead of disruption, click here.
