Preconditions for successful agile practice

In addition to the above supply capabilities within the supply chain, there is another set of factors that needs to be in place for the agile principles and practices described in the next section (section 7.2) to pay off or work at all. These are 

When we showed the financial impact of certain deals our sales teams had closed, it made them realise there were certain deals we should have walked away from. 

Even though it may be hard to assess economic gain or pain from product/serv-ice differentiation, reality can be checked by asking questions like  

Heineken, the brewer, offers a powerful example of the last point. During a recent Christmas season it introduced a special product for promotion in the market -the magnum bottle. This seasonal promotion and product won several marketing prizes, and created a lot of buzz (or fizz, even ) in the marketplace. It was also a product that suffered from substantial added shipment, packaging and production costs because different production line setups, bottles, labels and boxes were needed for a very limited demand window. Was it worth the effort and focus of the responsive capabilities that were needed  

Another powerful illustration of the issue is a tactic that one executive calls the warehouse dust test  

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