Top Highlights

• Thanks to global competition, faster product development, and increasingly flexible manufacturing systems
• inaccurate forecasts are increasing, and along with them the costs of those errors
• In industries with highly volatile demand, like fashion apparel, the costs of such “stockouts” and markdowns can actually exceed the total cost of manufacturing.
• quick-response programs, just-in-time (JIT) inventory systems, manufacturing resource planning, and the like are simply not up to the task
• manufacturing resource planning, for example, a manufacturer can rapidly change the production schedule stored in its computer when its original forecast and plan prove incorrect. Creating a new schedule doesn’t help, though, if the supply chain has already been filled based on the old one.

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