{"id":800,"date":"2010-04-29T13:20:58","date_gmt":"2010-04-29T20:20:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/?p=800"},"modified":"2010-04-29T13:20:58","modified_gmt":"2010-04-29T20:20:58","slug":"confessions-of-a-demand-planner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/demand-planning.com\/2010\/04\/29\/confessions-of-a-demand-planner\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Demand Planner"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maria Simos CEO e-forecasting.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Wednesday afternoon kicked off this year’s Institute of Business Forecasting & Planning’s Best Practices Conference<\/a> with a near-standing room only pre-conference Demand Management Forum.\u00a0 The Forum was led by Mike Gilliand from SAS and a panel of experts who brought the group through three topics: (1) Applying demand management sensing, shaping and creating, (2) What management must know and (3) Worst practices in business forecasting.\u00a0 The forum touched on many key issues faced by demand planning and forecasting professionals, giving the group a taste of what’s to come over the next two days.<\/p>\n

What makes this group so unique is that they are all demand planners. While they hail from different organizations they share in this specific role and are all part of a community dedicated to sharing and helping each other learn new techniques and working through challenges together.\u00a0 The last session, which was cheekily dubbed ‘a confessional’, had the panel and audience sharing stories of what didn\u2019t work.\u00a0 Try to imagine a room of over 75 people openly sharing mistakes and what was a disaster in their organization. For me this was such a refreshing experience seeing heads nod throughout the room as each participant spoke of their woes and a fury of note taking as a panelist or fellow forum attendee would provide some solutions or ideas for how to alleviate the issue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Panelist Jonathon Karelse from Yokohama Tire shared a worst practices experience and led the group through his folly of using a collaborative forecasting system for tire demand that did not work.\u00a0 While this was a method he learned at a previous IBF event, it happened to be ill-executed at Yokohama and led to excess inventory because of the bull-whip effect and beer games.\u00a0 One might ask \u201cWhat do beer and whips have to do with forecasting tire demand?\u201d Jonathon explained the bull-whip effect that as the velocity of the end of the whip gets so high that once it hits its target and ‘snaps’ what you are hearing is the end actually breaking the sound barrier. He used this analogy to explain what happened to the errors in supply chain. The Beer Games reference eluded to an MIT experiment which showed that a lack of trust within an organization can cause too much inventory.\u00a0 The Lessons learned were that removing the effect can be done by getting closer to each piece of the supply chain (and Jonathon still has a job so it must be true).<\/p>\n

A few other ideas that came up during discussions:<\/p>\n