Meet the Team -  Nishiket Sinha

Welcome to our latest meet the team blog

Meet Nishiket Sinha, one of Bedford’s Principal Solution Architect, and one of our supply chain experts. One of just many of his achievements is helping a global automotive manufacturer cut its production allocation optimisation run time by around 75 %, from up to an hour to roughly 12 minutes.

Part 1: Meet the Person Behind the Role

What excites you most about the work you do?

Turning a complex real-world problem into something a model can solve and then watching planners trust the answer. I especially enjoy the optimisation side: taking thousands of competing constraints and priorities and finding the best possible plan, not just a feasible one.

What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve received?

I am still waiting for the best one, however based on the consulting role I am doing currently, the best advice I have received is to understand the business problem before the technical one. It is tempting in our world to jump straight into modules, formulas and solvers, but the most valuable solutions come from understanding how a customer actually makes decisions and where those decisions break down. Once you get that right, the technical design almost follows on its own.

What made you join the world of planning?

Planning makes execution easier and faster, and at heart I am an executioner. I always cared about getting things done well and I realised early on that most execution problems are really planning problems.

Part 2: The Insight Behind the Expertise

What are the biggest challenges organisations are facing in this area today?

The lack of coordination. Sales, demand, supply, production and finance often plan in their own tools, on their own cadence, with their own assumptions. Each plan can be sensible on its own, but the handoffs are sequential and slow, so trade-offs get made late, by whoever happens to hold the spreadsheet last. The result is a plan nobody fully owns and a lot of time spent reconciling rather than deciding. Connected planning is only valuable if it actually connects the decisions, not just the data.

What’s one question every customer should ask before starting a transformation project?

I think this is relevant for every project, and they should start with technology and investment neutral questions like

1. What do they want to achieve from this project or what problems are we solving : The Objective.

2. How do we measure the outcomes?

3. What are the basic assumptions to support the business case?

4. Who are going to get the benefit (which roles)?

Tell us about the challenge, what you or the team changed, and the impact it had.

A global automotive manufacturer needed to allocate constrained production across roughly 4,500 vehicle derivative and market combinations over an 18-month horizon. Their legacy approach ran in three sequential stages, each solving part of the problem and passing its result to the next. It took 45 to 60 minutes per run, which limited how many scenarios planners could test in an S&OP cycle, and because each stage was optimised in isolation, the overall plan wasn’t necessarily the best one.

We replaced it with a single optimisation model built in Anaplan using Anaplan Optimizer. Instead of solving priorities one stage at a time, the model balances them together, such as meeting market demand, respecting capacity and managing shortfalls, according to the business’s agreed priorities.

The model now solves in around 12 minutes, a reduction of roughly 75%. Planners can run several scenarios within a single planning session rather than waiting an hour per iteration, which means S&OP conversations are now about comparing trade-offs rather than waiting for results. The approach was significant enough that I documented it in a technical paper on using weighted goal programming to improve S&OP decision-making.