Forecasting: The First Step to Success





By successfully addressing your forecasting deficiencies, you can improve the health of your entire Supply Chain and Operations flow.





Building something new is challenging, but working with a good, collaborative team can make all the difference.


After the 2008 credit crisis, I found myself looking for a new role. Luckily for me, after acquiring Gerber, Nestle decided to divest their baby products division and created a new entity - NUK USA. This new entity needed someone to build a supply chain, and I was hired to do so. The NUK team became an amazingly collaborative team - with Supply Chain, Sales, and Customer Service building an exceptional organization that crushed forecasting.


One of my business mantras is that forecasts make or break a company, and this is the proof. With our S&OP/IBP process being so successful, we were able to tackle the excessive inventory that we inherited when the company was created and dramatically “lean out” our production plans. Our finished goods inventory was cut in half - freeing up millions of dollars locked in our warehouse and significantly reducing our annual storage costs. All this was done while improving our on-time-in-full metrics and nearly doubling our SKU count.


By cutting our inventory at our 3PL and in-house, we were able to move our distribution from our 3PL to our own in-house warehouse. This saved the company millions in transportation and storage costs. It also made our Supply Chain greener by taking hundreds of miles of transportation out of every unit we produced.


Process improvement and culture change can be a challenge. As we work toward improving our organization, cooperation and communication are critical.