A Practitioner’s Approach to Responsive Supply Planning

[email protected] Abstract: The planning of supply for fashion products, seasonal products and technologically innovative products presents certain similar challenges. These products are characterized by high demand uncertainty and require responsive supply chains to effectively match supply to demand. Further, for such products, it is useful to explicitly model how forecast uncertainty is expected to reduce in the future as demand information improves. This paper explores this important domain and defines the domain characteristics unambiguously and in a way useful to practitioners. The concept of staging potential of a product is proposed as a new and important concept. The paper investigates how adoption of this concept may impact industry practice. Finally, the paper describes a few simulation studies to illustrate how supply chain practitioners may use the concept of staging potential as a guide to decision making.