In today’s supply chain environment, sourcing executives are being asked to solve for five competing priorities at once: cost, speed, resilience, quality, and sustainability. We call this the Impossible Pentagon — because optimising any one of them typically comes at the expense of another.

Yet most brands and retailers are still making these trade-offs using the same tool they’ve relied on for decades: Excel, anchored to intake cost. That approach systematically underestimates the impact of sourcing decisions on markdowns, sell-through, and full-year profitability. In this article, we lay out the questions sourcing leaders should be asking — and how data-driven P&L modelling changes the answers.