A day in the life of a Demand Planning Lead for a sportswear manufacturer using Microsoft Loop


7:30 am

On the train to work, Ethan sees a Microsoft Teams chat that includes a bulleted list component that summarizes news from a recent conference. He adds his comments within the component on the Teams mobile app and @mentions his manager to bring her into the loop.

8:30 am

Once in the office, Ethan meets with the product team to discuss insights on product feedback. Throughout the meeting, he captures action items in a task list component titled Product Demand Tasks and pins it to the Teams meeting chat for quick reference. His team adds tasks, responsible parties, and deadlines to the component in sync.

9:00 am

To ensure that his manager is aware of next steps, Ethan copies the Product Demand Tasks component into an Outlook email. He can see his manager make comments to the component in real-time, which updates both the body of the email and Teams meeting chat.

11:30 am

Ethan needs some clarifications on assumptions his finance team made in the latest forecast. He starts an email in Outlook and inserts a Q&A component, which he populates with a few questions before sending. The finance team answers the questions within the component, and Ethan can clearly see who responded to which question, as their icon and name are highlighted next to their response.

2:00 pm

Ethan rides with a peer to the factory floor and decides to
check in on updates to the Product Demand Tasks component on his phone. Because he pinned it to the chat, Ethan can quickly see that there have been updates and comments made by his peers asynchronously.

3:00 pm

Ethan uses the Teams Chat with self feature to capture thoughts before he is ready to share with his team. While walking the factory floor, he inserts a numbered list component titled Product SKU Priority and lists his top five (5) products SKUs to investigate further ahead of the next month’s supplier order

4:30 pm

Back at his laptop, Ethan opens the Product SKU Priority component in Teams chat and decides to convert the numbered list to a table component. He adds columns for SKU numbers, industry considerations, and comments, then shares the component with his industry analyst for input