I think we are going to continue our new years theme and focus on the possibilities. I am pretty sure you didn’t toast in the New Year last Saturday night with jaded apathy. Far likelier you thought of the vast accomplishments on the horizon in 2012 for your personal life, your health and your career. Like new hires and those newly promoted – your intent is to hit your metrics, earn your bonus, set yourself up for future success and have the best year yet.
This optimism stands in stark juxtaposition to what we hear from prospective clients when we tell them we can lower their forecast error by 25%. We touched on this skepticism in previous blog post discussing now being time to raise the bar for demand planning and forecasting outcomes. It very well might be the high rate of IT implementation failures alone that create disbelief but their reasons (dare I say, excuses?) for not moving forward, span from a company process that doesn’t align with individual goals for their position to the simple fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and 36 hours of work. Having dealt with the realities of their roles they seem willing to simply meet the minimum requirements. In these conversations they initially cast aside what they consider to be “impossible” because of a limited perspective of what could be. And that is bad for them and that is bad for their company.
Have you stopped believing in POSSIBILITY and settled for mediocrity?
You would never purport that someone who has resolved to lose 10lbs in the New Year would be successful without a scale because you know it’s a critical component of measuring progress towards their goal. You also know that weight is not the only component for good health and because muscle weighs more than fat, you could actually gain weight while improving overall health. You need the right tools in to set yourself up for success in a complicated environment characterized by huge amounts of data, fast moving market dynamics and a changing customer environment. Accordingly, without specific improvements, you cannot expect that your ERP will lower your inventory or increase perfect order performance. Nor will traditional statistics based modeling drive a significant, measurable decrease in forecast error as effectively as modeling based on global optimization. Run your antiquated forecasting tool as many times as you want but old fashioned, static and linear models that everyone else uses and incorrect forecasting models will most likely leave you with the same inaccurate and profit reducing, customer infuriating forecasts.
There are better tools than the one you are using today that will get you to your 2012 goals. You can have an accurate forecast. You can blow your metrics out of the water. You can get out of the office earlier because you had more accurate data and made smart and informed decisions. When a prospective client accepts that a 25% reduction in forecast error is possible based solely on our proprietary Interactive Neural Computing, the doors open to the opportunities they can create for themselves. Our clients achieve 3-8% improvement in pre-tax profitability because they believe in the possibilities.
More about our forecasting and planning software.