Driving Risk Out of S&OP Forecasts

MIT’s Supply Chain blog presented a nice research study by Minhaaj Khan and Srideepti Kidambi and supervised by Dr. Tugba Efendigil.  Their study is a good example of using less data rather than more to design a simple readily explainable approach that increases profits while reducing errors in ordering.  It’s an easy win.  Will it work in all scenarios? No, probably not.  But it also doesn’t take long to try and implement.  Occam’s Razor in action. It’s interesting they did not even need to know about promotions to achieve their gains. In many businesses the promotions can wreck plans. But in this consumer product it turns out they don’t disrupt.

Big data can sometimes confuse us rather than enlighten.

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