Lessons from the CAT Logistics Services, Inc. Best In Class Processes for Demand Planning

Today’s service-parts organizations, such as those in the aerospace and defense, automotive, agricultural, heavy equipment, and industrial machinery industries, are pursuing the service-parts/ spare-parts market for revenue and profit growth. Increasing customer demands and a dynamic marketplace are forcing these organizations to operate at a new level of flexibility and responsiveness in order to efficiently address customer requirements and attain desirable profit margins.

Since The Geek Gap first appeared, Bill and I have given presentations all over the country on this topic. Sometimes we spoke to high-level execs at Fortune 500 companies. Other times we spoke to graduate students, just starting their careers. But we kept noticing the same thing about all these audiences: they were mostly composed of geeks. Even in situations where a suit set up the event and invited business folks, most of the crowd turned out to be from IT.

Social media encompasses a range of applications and services available to support communications, collaboration, and information sharing within an individual enterprise and beyond. Our report seeks to identify industry trends and best practices by combining quantitative and qualitative research.