Profitable growth is at the forefront of manufacturing executives’ minds¹. The math is simple: increase revenue and decrease costs. Easy, right? Unfortunately, getting there isn't that simple. The good news is that analytics can help. The better news is that there’s a new place for manufacturers to discover analytic best
Do you hear voices? I sure hope so. I’m not talking about the ones associated with psychiatric disorders or medical conditions, but the voices of quality. To compare the two for a just a moment, the medical description from HealthGrades explains that auditory hallucinations can be pleasant or threatening and
With all the enhancements in demand management over the past decade, companies are still faced with challenges impeding the advancement of demand-driven planning. Many organizations are struggling with how to analyze and make practical use of the mass of data being collected and stored. Others are perplexed as how to
This is a follow up to last week’s blog on understanding your customers’ perceptions of quality. As the world’s largest manufacturer of PCs and tablets, Lenovo is always looking for areas to reduce costs while increasing quality and customer satisfaction. Six months ago, Lenovo implemented the Lenovo Early Detection (LED) system
I was recently asked by a customer if they should move the responsibility for creating the statistical baseline forecast. They were considering moving it from their regional country offices to their global headquarters. In addtion, they were considering changing the role of their regional demand planners to only make adjustments to
People are talking about your products. But more importantly, they’re listening. Facebook, Twitter, review sites, and product forums are just a few of the sources that a savvy customer checks when making a buying decision. This reality has fundamentally changed the definition of quality. It’s no longer sufficient to conform
Well okay maybe you can't hear us, but at least you can read what we have to say. Although, I'm not ruling out an occasional video or podcast entry. One of the best kept secrets at SAS is the incredible domain expertise that comes to work here everyday, ready to
Increasingly, automotive executives want to talk about the "Art of the Possible" in analytics. So we took the opportunity to invite leaders around the industry to an Automotive Analytics Executive Roundtable to share their stories and spark new ideas. A myriad of diverse speakers covered a variety of topics on big data/Hadoop, the
Companies have become obsessed with product quality – and for good reason. Customer dynamics, their willingness to expose product quality issues socially on the web, and the ease with which they can jump to competitive products make quality a more important differentiator than ever before. Over the past 15 years,
Downstream data have been electronically available on a weekly basis since the late 1980s. But most companies have been slow to adopt downstream data for planning and forecasting purposes. Let's look at why that is. Downstream data is data that originates downstream on the demand side of the value chain. Examples
