Does it replace planners’ expertise?

No. It augments human expertise with better data and risk visibility. Planners remain in charge of strategic decisions, customer relationships and exception handling, while the model takes care of the repetitive calculations that no team can scale manually across thousands of SKUs and locations. The shift is from spending most of the day producing numbers to spending most of it interpreting them and acting on the few that matter. In practice, planners gain a clearer picture of demand uncertainty, lead time risk and inventory exposure per SKU period, which lets them apply their judgment where it has the most impact on service level and working capital.