Predictive Demand Supply - Sponsored Whitepaper

If you're in the Supply Chain business, right up there with Newton's Law of Gravity stands Murphy's Other Law stipulating that Demand and Supply, if left to their own tendencies, will always tend to diverge and get you in trouble. In the case of gravity, we have all hopefully learned to predict what it personally means to us (jump out of a tree and down you go!), and so we readily know how to avoid its negative effects (don't jump!). With Demand and Supply (D/S) imbalances, while we all recognize the symptoms (back-orders, extended lead-times, irate customers, etc.), Murphy, unlike Newton, never seems to give us advance warning or enlighten us on how to avoid falling into their trap.

Further adding to the D/S fulfillment dilemma, Sales and Operations do not inherently share a common language upon which to base their discussion of issues and potential resolutions when Murphy strikes. I suppose that "finger-pointing" might be a mutually shared form of sign language, but not a very helpful one! Yet, the ability to succeed grows exponentially when Sales and Operations share common motivations and a clear understanding of how to collectively act together to defeat Murphy. High levels of customer satisfaction and shareholder benefit only result when optimization occurs across the enterprise. Imagine a world where Sales and Operations are actually rowing in the same direction!

Predictive Demand Supply ChainLink Research- All Rights Reserved 2010

Welcome to the world of Predictive Demand/Supply Planning whose mission is to predict imbalances as far in advance as possible, in order to provide ample time and opportunity to design and implement corrective Sales & Operations solutions.

The more time we allow for resolving forecasted imbalances, the greater the number of potential cost- effective solutions. So how do we design a system for identifying potential issues and expressing them via a commonly understood key process indicator (KPI) where the cause and effect of our actions can be readily measured?