Humankind is forever striving for perfection. When it comes to the job of demand forecasting, however, perhaps we ought to be a tad less obsessive. Nobody's arguing that the forecast is irrelevant. Suppliers and retailers need some way to get a handle on what the customer's going to buy. But the all-consuming quest for the perfect number is bound to fail. Reality has an annoying way of refusing to cooperate with expectations. Lora Cecere, founder of Supply Chain Insights, joins us on this episode to prescribe a way out of the dilemma. She proposes to redefine the discipline of forecasting and demand planning, with an eye toward embracing probability. In the event, companies can move closer to what ought to be their real goal: crafting an agile supply-chain with end-to-end visibility, and the power to respond to actual demand. ''We've gone about it all wrong,'' Cecere says.

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