يوليو-تمّوز [15ث] 2008
دور من هو في طلب نبوءه
إمداد تموين يتلقّى مخططات مماثلة [دت-غثرينغ] وحساب حاجات. For instance, if a product is expected to be short in supply, should the company put on an extra shift or outsource? Or if supply is expected to exceed demand, should it halt production or build inventory for future use?”
The article although points to the fact that the future of forecasting depends on the use of advanced technologies, does not talk about existing collaborative and interactive technologies and capabilities that can be exploited. Though the non IT executives are aware of advantages of ‘collaboration’ in improving the forecasting process they are not aware of Web 2.0 capabilities that can be exploited to improve the forecasting. The article also does not talk about another existing technology: Business Intelligence. There are several Business Intelligence capabilities around the data that can be integrated to intelligently ‘feedforward’ relevant existing data into the next iteration of forecasting thus increasing accuracy.
This clearly indicates existing technological knowledge gap exists for the business strategist and non technical executives and is a great opportunity for the IT executives to bridge those gap. Several existing collaborative and business intelligence tools can streamline collaboration across the entire supply-chain. These collaborative Web 2.0 technologies can not only greatly minimize the bullwhip effect but can make the entire supply-chain agile for the demand changes. IT enabled collaboration and business intelligence capability is critical in tackling the increasing complexity and IT executives need to quickly integrate those technologies in the forecasting business process.
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1 Comment »
Collagist on 23 Jul 2008 at 6:51 am #
Raj - Enjoy reading your blog.
I wanted to comment on two points that you mentioned:
“There needs to be a central database where different parties can easily store and view the latest sales, inventory and purchasing data. Historical data are important, too, to gauge forecast accuracy over time.”
When you study the value chain of the suppliers, company, and the company’s vendors and customers, it is possible to improve cost or productivity and forecast better. If these initiatives are solely driven by the company and the suppliers or vendors do not see any cost improvements then it can get any momentum. In a matured industry, however, I would suppose that the suppliers are closely aligned with various customers and a standardized processes and central databases or data communication can be set up.
“There are several Business Intelligence capabilities around the data that can be integrated to intelligently ‘feedforward’ relevant existing data into the next iteration of forecasting thus increasing accuracy.”
This is a very good area and I guess that is going to gain a lot of interest in the business community. The use of dashboards and communication between various parties is going to improve not just forecast but many other value-added and cost improvement factors.