That said, I am going first to briefly summarize the discussion at what JDA calls its Demand Optimization Council, a group of some of its best retail, consumer goods and wholesale customers that meets the day before the conference formally starts, with presentations by members on some theme. This year it was new product introductions and the supply chain. I am there as a participant, and thus very limited in what I can report back, but can comment on some things at a high level, starting with a couple of interesting notes. One large regional grocery chain has a new mandate to achieve 100% in stocks in store. It already had very high service levels, but the new goal is zero out-of-stocks. As you might imagine, a company manager said it really needs to make some significant changes in processes to reach to the goal. Can it really be done? More importantly, is it worth it? I would say those are both open questions. But this is now the quest. Another retail DOC member interestingly noted that the company had moved in the last year to what is called an "open-to-buy” concept, where merchants are basically given a budget for a given categ ory that constrains their spending, with the obvious goal of reducing inventories. But it is not working out nearly as well as expected. Why? Because if something is a hot seller, of course the buyer can purchase more from suppliers to take advantage of the opportunity. No one is going to constrain the spend to the original open-to-buy number and lose sales for the SKUs that are exceeding forecast. Meanwhile. the buyers have probably hit their open-to-buy maxes on other items. Interesting. On NPI, virtually every company has a fairly sophisticated process for getting new product […]