Thinking ahead

- [Instructor] Can you predict the future? Come on, of course you can. In fact, all of us try to predict the future every single day. Think about it, we're actually predicting the future when we assume that someone will show up for a meeting, or that a supplier will deliver an order, or even that customers will buy our products and services. When you work in the supply chain, you're making guesses about the future all the time, but people wouldn't take us seriously if we called our predictions guesses, so instead we supply chain folks call them forecasts. For example, we forecast how much our company's going to sell and we forecast how much a factory will produce. We use forecasts like these to plan the whole supply chain, but the funny thing is that the future is full of surprises. Our forecasts are very often wrong, and that's a big problem because in every supply chain we need to plan for lead times. It can take a really long time to order material, make products, and deliver them…