Bob, the CFO, opened the meeting with the statement, "Our SAP implementation was expensive. I know we need it, but I am trying to get a return on the investment.  I think that I can improve the ROI by using retail point-of-sale data to improve forecasting and replenishment.  How are others using POS data?"

I swallowed hard.  This question does not have an easy answer.  Most companies are struggling to answer the same question.  The company had built a repository for demand data and wanted to plug it into SAP APO, but I knew that it was not as easy as that.  I replied, "You cannot get there from here.  The data in the repository used by the account teams cannot just be plugged into APO for three reasons:  scalability, granularity, and usability." And, I started to tell him a story.

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