Resources

My initial exposure to the impact of the Sales & Operations Planning process was perhaps the single most important experience in my career. I was a marketing manager at the time … the stereotypical caricature of genetically optimistic unaccountability. When my counterpart in manufacturing promised to make as much ice cream as I projected we’d sell, I recoiled in horror. “Whoa,” I remember saying,…

Steve Johnston, who founded Demand Solutions in 1984 and retired in 2004, passed away this past January. Bill Whiteside, now a Principal in Demand Solutions Northeast, was an early Demand Solutions customer, and was one of the company's first sales representatives. Bill wrote this tribute to Steve.

"Billy, let's grab a smoke." I don't smoke. Never have. It was Steve Johnston's way of…

The brand new Demand Solutions e-book: 42 Principles of Forecasting provides practical and actionable tips for how any company can improve its forecasting process. This article is an extended version of one of those principles: “#7 “Reward Accuracy.”

I used to work in a dairy, a 99-year-old family-run business that manufactured ice cream in every flavor imaginable and every package size…

If I was a forecaster at your company, you can rest assured that I'd work diligently to provide forecasts that were as accurate as possible.

However, if you told me that my results were going to be displayed on a dashboard, tacked to a billboard or published in any other way ... all of a sudden forecast accuracy would be raised a couple of notches on my priority list. Somehow I'd find…

A guy walks up to the counter in an old-fashioned hat store. He's wearing 10 small cowboy hats in a neat pile atop his head. After a quick double-take, the proprietor remarks: "Our customers usually buy the ten-gallon hat. You're the first to buy ten one-gallon hats."

This describes a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker several years ago, and it provides an indirect foundation for the…