Demand management capabilities

Like a compass, the market-driven demand signal needs to be built as a true north for the organization. To make this happen, companies need to focus on the elimination of bias (consistent overforecasting or underforecasting), ft is not easy. The challenges to building market-driven demand management capabilities are many ... 

The demand management process must balance the customer s requirements with the firm s supply capabilities. Part of managing demand involves attempting to determine what and when customers will purchase. A good demand management system uses point-of-sale and key customer data to reduce uncertainty and provide efficient flows throughout the supply chain. 

A good demand management process will enhance the S OP analysis by providing a consensus demand forecasting environment that incorporates statistical methodologies, dashboarding capabilities and... 

Implementing FVA into the demand management process requires that forecasts be recorded and saved before and after each cycle. Having the capabilities to store forecast history by a stream of activities (e.g., consensus forecast adjustments, managerial overrides, price lift calculations, etc.) is critical to measuring the value-added, or non-value-added, contribution to the overall process. Utilizing the statistical baseline forecast as the default is the key to establishing a benchmark to measure the effectiveness of all the touch points in the process. Unfortunately, few companies capture the appropriate data, or the level of detail on a historical basis, to conduct FVA. This is an opportunity. 

Based on Croxton et al. (2002), the demand management process is concerned with balancing the customers requirements with the supply chain capabilities. This includes forecasting demand and synchronizing it with production, procurement, and distribution capabilities. A good demand management process can enable a company to be more proactive to anticipated demand. 

It could be argued that the key to RAT as a model of driver behaviour is in explaining how the driver is able to determine the gap between capability and task demand. Both capability and task demand are well-established concepts that can possibly be debated in terms of their precise description, and the terminology used, but not in terms of their existence driving places demands on the driver that must be managed and the driver possesses finite processing capacity to deal with those demands. However, the mechanism by which a driver determines the level of d and, and understands its position relative to their capability is open to debate. 

Determined not to see a repeat of this catastrophic event - the size of the inventory write-off created a new world record and led to a major financial setback for the company - Cisco set out to build a state of the art communications network to enable information to be shared across the extended enterprise of their major tier 1 suppliers and logistics service providers. This has been achieved through the creation of an e-hub . The purpose of the e-hub is to act as the nerve centre and to ensure real-time visibility of demand, inventory levels and production schedules. Through its event management capability it can provide early warning of supply chain problems. 

Next in Fig. 8.6, we illustrate the capabilities that the humanitarian relief chain should possess, using the framework developed in Chap. 1. Note that the cluster of capabilities, labeled as demand management refers to external drivers, whereas the other three clusters labeled as fund management , logistics , and collaboration relate to internal drivers. 

The application of the science of human factors to eliminating error in all aspects of process design, management, operation, and maintenance is the focus of this work. Human error has been a major cause of almost all of the catastrophic accidents that have occurred in the chemical process industries (CPI). If one adopts the broad view of human error as being the result of a mismatch between human capabilities and process demands, then clearly management s role is critical in the following areas ... 

Chapter 1, The Role of Human Error in Chemical Process Safety, discusses the importance of reducing human error to an effective process safety effort at the plant. The engineers, managers, and process plant personnel in the CPI need to replace a perspective that has a blame and punishment view of error with a systems viewpoint that sees error as a mismatch between human capabilities and demands. 

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