Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR)

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Business economics - Miscellaneous grade: A San Diego State University course: Seminararbeit im MBA Studiengang language: English abstract: Today's business environment is facing more challenges than it has ever faced before. Whether it be globalization shorter product life cycles industry-wide consolidations or the rapid advancements that have been made in information technology - all these factors have contributed to a steady increase in competitive pressure on domestic and foreign markets. In an economy that is increasingly becoming more volatile organizations find it more difficult to achieve or maintain their competitive advantage.A way of overcoming these challenges and establishing advantages has been through optimization of the supply chain. Initially these improvement efforts were limited to areas within the organization such as inventory quality or the manufacturing process itself. In the early nineties however when the American retail and consumer goods industry was experiencing stagnating revenues and at the same time rising costs an increase in productivity was hardly to be realized. At that time aggressive pricing policies were seen as the only approach to gain market share but the consequences mainly a negative impact on margins and profits made it an unsustainable business practice (Seifert 2003). This led the retail industry to recognize that real gains could only be realized through open cooperative partnerships between retailers and manufacturers. As the supply chain improvement initiatives progressed they began to include collaboration between the manufacturer its suppliers and clients. Although collaboration between trading partners was known as an efficient method for improving forecast accuracy increasing service and reducing costs it was not until then that supply chain partners systematically devised processes that would move the information to where it could ad