Demand Forecasting Quotes

When you went into a Boston Chicken and ordered quarter-chicken, white, with mash and corn, when that was rung up, that would signal all the way along the supply chain the need for more potatoes to be put on a truck a thousand miles away.

In the past, I had the marketing know how to get people to talk about my products, but I didn't have the infrastructure or logistics to fulfill the demand properly.

It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want

We can serve our customers well only if our buying jobs are right. You cannot sell if you haven't ordered wanted goods into your store.

It took us three years to even come close to catching up with the demand a little bit.

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

There's always a fine line between 'What is the market going to bear?' and, 'By the way, I've got 2,000 unsold seats.'

Retailing, it's always true that there is some items that I wish we had a lot more of like the iPod and there is some items I wish we had a lot less of.

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

One of the things I've probably absorbed when I was in business school - and didn't know I was learning it - was about life cycles, that things begin, and they peak, and then they decline. So whether you look at life cycles of fashion, or you look at life cycles of things that people buy, designs, everything is in a life cycle. Getting out of the apparel businesses and into beauty and lingerie, those were very big bets, but they were very deliberately thought about and tested over time.

Uber has an information advantage, a computational advantage. There's massive structural advantages to the player who's smartest about how to deploy cars, where to deploy cars, how to adjust pricing dynamics, how to ensure supply of drivers - the party that understands best the behavior of riders.

I begin by looking for megatrends, changes in the world that will create major new demands. My goal is to create a company that can be there to meet those demands.

Logistics comprises the means and arrangements which work out the plans of strategy and tactics. Strategy decides where to act; logistics brings the troops to this point.

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

Once you’re in sales, you will also learn what sells and what not. Use the sensitivity of detecting market sentiments as a platform for running your business and in the identification of product winners in the future.

In many places, above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries, logistics is today considered the only possible form of strict philosophy, because its result and procedures yield an assured profit for the construction of the technological universe. In America and elsewhere, logistics as the only proper philosophy of the future is thus beginning today to seize power over the intellectual world.

Supply always comes on the heels of demand.

For physical goods, there are costs associated with logistics and lead times, owing to inventories and poor forecasts of the market. With digital capital-intensive technology, however, production will inevitably move toward the final market, wherever it is. This re-localization constitutes a major shift in the structure of global supply networks.

Has anyone actually asked the customer if they want to have something available directly after the show? You hear that three bags are going to be released tomorrow in five shops, so you produce 15 bags. How many customers are you going to satisfy with that? Fifteen!

It was Dell who came out with their build-on-demand process, where they are able to keep a zero balance inventory. That means they don't purchase parts until an order is received. That is a way to greatly reduced overhead, since you don't need to warehouse parts or overstock parts you may not end up using.

If, over time, patients don't go to some services, then progressively they become less viable, so you do arrive at a point where the conclusion is: 'These are the right services for the future, and this is capacity we don't need.'

The only source from which an entrepreneurs profits stem is his ability to anticipate better than other people the future demand of the consumers.

We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.

While our team managed the manufacturing ramp better than ever before, we could have sold many more iPhones with greater supply and we are working hard to fill orders as quickly as possible.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.