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Connecting Customer Demand to the Plant Floor

Discrete manufacturers produce and sell goods they can count — a reality that encourages many to forecast demand by looking in the rearview mirror at past performance. It’s understandable: using previously filled orders for discrete resource and production planning is far easier than using anticipated consumption quantities, which vary in real time — and require far more flexibility to manage.

Relying on the past may have worked in the old, batch-and-queue days of discrete operations. However, manufacturers navigating a competitive global marketplace can’t manage today by looking at yesterday’s results. Firms that focus on past performances miss huge opportunities to leverage insights, expertise, and market knowledge from their sales forces and customers — intelligence that can make customer demand more visible, forecasts more accurate, product development more nimble, and supply chains more efficient. And in the current economic climate, in which customer orders (and even customers) disappear overnight, it’s more important than ever to link true demand and actual production.

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