How long does it really take to deploy a planning solution?

For a well-defined demand planning or supply planning scope, 3 to 4 months from scoping to go-live is realistic, provided the data is accessible and key users are available for workshops. Plum Living, with 630 SKUs across two warehouses, went live in 3 months, and SupplyCaddy, with a lighter scope of about 250 items, in 2 weeks.

For complex, multi-business or multi-subsidiary scopes, deployment is split into successive waves, each following the four phases. The first wave carries most of the integration effort, and later waves move much faster since the data flows are already in place. The limiting factor is almost never the platform: it is IT's capacity to produce daily extracts, and business users' availability for workshops.