We need to forecast better by anticipating not only growth

Question

Group decision making key points for our team

1^st person who works on BEAD product

The product I focused on was Bead - Low End

• Understanding Age and Price were the two key attributes customers focused on and also that the ideal spot lags the circles center I wanted to minimize the number of changes we made to the product - thus only changing it in round 3.
• We started off strong in this segment and quickly captured market share with Andrews dropping out and us setting the lowest price.
• As we hit round 4 we did not do enough to stay competitive with Digby and Chester from a price perspective.
• We always remained competitive with others because Bead was one of the few products we invested sales and promo dollars into round 1.
• Looking back we had a big issue with forecasting which cost us a lot of money in some rounds.
• Not investing in enough automation and capacity in the first two rounds really hurt our margins in subsequent rounds - looking forward to the real rounds we intend to correct this. (especially in the area of automation).
• Our plan to only make one R&D adjustment paid off by round 5 when our competitors either had a stale product or too young of a product, however, we stocked out and lost on a huge % of market share.

 Lessons learned...

• We need to forecast better by anticipating not only growth in demand but also trying to identify the strategy of our competitors
• Invest more heavily in production the first two rounds to allow us to cut our prices and protect our margins in later rounds
• Do not slack on sales an promo

2^nd person

I think a lot of your analysis applies across the board to all products. Some other points to include:

- Company structure, with each essentially a product manager handling R&D, marketing, and production with some input from others. Group decisions made on investments and finance. I think this worked well for the most part but I don't think we paid enough attention to what our competitors were doing, we were very focused internally and not anticipating their moves, other than maybe price.

- Difficult to maintain position with R&D in all segments. We slipped in the size segment enough that it made sense to transition Buddy to Traditional market. I think this was a pretty successful transition and in the last round helped bring us back to profitability.

- We started off very conservatively, which helped us as others made errors that we were able to take advantage of. I think this gave us a blind spot to the issues we had in terms of not investing in automation and marketing enough initially.

3^rd person -

We can attribute out success and shortcomings to our internal analysis of company and products. Whereas, we did not anticipate/took into account that our competitors will increase automation and reduce pricing specially in traditional market. Second, we did not forecast properly in second and third round which cost us a lot in extra inventory and had to resort to emergency loan. And we stocked out in one round, whereas, we could have produced more to capture available market share. Though we did recover in round four and five, we still did not capture market's top spot in traditional sector. Like Peter said, in this round we are investing heavily in product automation and increasing capacity, that will help us capture market in future.

Attachment:- Assignment.rar