Electronic collaboration forecasts

The research community has responded to the E-Business challenge. Despite the infamous dot-com bust in the early 2000 s, scores of research initiatives, workshops, technical papers, and special journal issues have been devoted to the subject. E-Business remains a critical subject not only in the research community, but also in corporate boardrooms. Instead of the revolution that would replace every facet of business, the rise of E-Business might be viewed as the emergence of new economic intermediaries that offer opportunities for innovation. These new intermediaries offer different means to respond to market demands (e.g., Internet vs. traditional channels), to facilitate sourcing, procurement, and price discovery (e.g., electronic auctions), and to develop new mechanisms for coordination and execution (e.g., dynamic pricing, revenue management, and collaborative forecasting). 

As we discussed in Chapter 12, CPFR or just collaborative forecasting is the process of setting up a continual line of communication between you and those customers with the abihty to predict the future needs of the products they buy from you. Advances in electronic commerce have facilitated better communications between computer systems that has resulted in the development of electronic CPFR systems. Large retailers like Wal-Mart and Tesco are benefiting from sophisticated CPFR systems by electronic link with the major suppUers ERP and global supply chain systems. 

Fashion apparel and other seasonal goods follow a seasonal pattern of danand. Thus, collaborative planning in these categories has a horizon of a single season and is performed at seasonal intervals. Given the seasonal nature, forecasts rely less on historical data and more on collaborative interpretation of industry trends, macroeconomic factors, and customer tastes. In this form of collaboration, the trading partners develop an assortment plan jointly. The output is a planned purchase order at the style/color/size level. The planned order is shared electronically in advance... 

---