Is this counterintuitive? Not really. In S&OP, the forecast has been recast as a Demand Plan. A Demand Plan begins with the statistical forecast and then takes business intelligence from Sales and Marketing. Together, got that TOGETHER, the functions agree on an agreed upon forecast… er… demand plan. This demand plan is then used to drive [...]

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I posed a rather simple poll on LinkedIn regarding Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) and Forecast Accuracy. I then posted an announcement of the poll, to generate participation on many of the appropriate LinkedIn Groups I belong to. I also invited people to discuss the topic on the group sites. In a short time we [...]

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I recently expounded the concept of Statistical Thinking whereby people, particularly, business people should develop and nurture a conceptual understanding of the role of variation and uncertainty in the numbers we deal with on a daily basis.  It is not necessary to be able to derive formulae or even do the computations.  Statistical Thinking is a [...]

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Kaoru Ishikawa is one of the most famous Japanese Quality Control thinkers, teachers, and authors. His books What is Total Quality Control? (1985) and Introduction to Quality Control (1990) are still among the most influential books I have ever read. Ishikawa is most known for the Ishikawa Diagram one of the seven basic tools used [...]

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There is a lot of press on what is happening to Toyota these days. With the problems of sticky accelerators on some models and brakes that don’t seem to want to stick on others, the company that was the icon of quality for three plus decades is in uncharted territory. The problems the company is [...]

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