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Absorbing consumer feedback - like an Ostrich or a Hawk?
Most companies claim to be consumer centric – actively engaged in gathering consumer feedback and acting on it. Are they?
An important feedback consumers give us continually and at the most granular level is their purchase behaviour – either picking our products from the retail shelves or rejecting them in favour of our competitors. It’s a silent feedback and an extremely important one. We get it by tracking our consumer sales and retail stockouts.
Do we have systems to absorb this information in a timely manner and act on it? Unfortunately, our conventional demand forecasting process ignores it on most days and acts on it only once a month during the Demand Review phase. Some companies now have a system to review it on weekly basis. This is behaving like an Ostrich most of the time, closing our eyes and digging our heads into sand.
Agile Supply Chains, on the other hand, behave like Hawks, keeping a constant vigil on this information and using it to continually tweak the supplies in line with changing demand patterns.
The process they follow is nothing but Demand Sensing…