Big spreadsheet analyses that take days will probably not meet most of your customers' high performance requirements"”whether they are retailers or OEMs. So suppliers really have to be able to take in all the data, call the shots, and make their move very quickly. No Hail Mary play will get you to the goal.

Everyone raves about the genius of Steve Jobs, creating a great product that was massively accepted in the market; or the blockbuster drug that carries a company to greatness. However, the iPhone, Lipitor, and other home runs were the product of painstaking effort, much research, trial and error, and competitors' successes and failures, as well.

So the question we must ask is do we have the data we need to truly understand how our products perform in the market? Is that data coming to us with the right level of granularity so we can understand product demand by market, geography, and other demand factors? Do we have the data at the right stages across the chain"”both the demand and supply side"”to properly plan for profitable sales?

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Keywords: demand variability, forecasting accuracy, supply chain management IT, supply chain systems