Earlier I talked about the difficulty of building a good forecast for a new product. But just saying it's hard and throwing out a WAG number doesn't cut it when you have to project production. It's the whole supply chain thing. Too much, and you're eating inventory. Too little, and you have real unhappy customers who tell their friends.
Fortunately for us we've been talking to a lot of people for a year now. So when we build our forecast model for the launch, we actually have names of real people who are interested in our product and service. But the unseen side is a fast uptake of the long tail on what we are doing.
How fast can you scale? What if you're 10x too low on your forecast?
For us, we have very strong and very large partners providing help on our critical items. And to keep in check, instead of using a fixed quarterly forecast, we're using a rolling 90 day go-forward average. So we load upfront some excess capacity and then as we move into the quarters we factor in the actuals. No big swings. Now we are comfortable that we can meet any demand while keeping overhead in check.
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