Guides & Playbooks

Practical guides on the planning decisions that come up week to week: forecasting, inventory, replenishment, pricing, promotions and the S&OP cadence that ties them together. Written by the TrueGradient editorial team, reviewed by the founders and planning leads who ran these processes at Amazon, Walmart, Mondelēz and IBM.

Every guide starts from a failure mode rather than a definition: an accuracy report that flatters the number, a replenishment rule that fires on stale demand, a promotion that lifted volume and lost margin, a forecast workbook that can no longer absorb change. Some are foundational: what a term means, how a calculation works. Others are evaluative: how to size the problem, what to fix first, when a manual process stops paying for itself.