THE DRIVERS, OF DEMAND

摘要

The discipline of supply chain management is made up of three distinct, but interdependent, functions that include demand planning, resource planning, and operations planning. Each of these functions is inseparably linked to the others by shared cause-and-effect relationships. The cornerstone of this relationship is the ambiguous demand plan that always seems to escape reality, leaving the anguished forecast manager the unenviable task of explaining to the organization why the customers didn't order what was projected in the plan. Pity the forecast manager who attempts to explain to the CEO that the variances to the demand forecast occurred as a result of a misunderstood variable in a sophisticated regression analysis algorithm. You might as well suggest that the sun, moon, and stars didn't line up as predicted in the horoscopes from the Sunday paper.