Produção e consumo

Um interessante artigo no WSJ, "Shops Ordered Lots of Bikes in 2020. Peddling Them Is an Uphill Climb."

"ElliptiGo Inc. Chief Executive Bryan Pate didn't have enough of his outdoor elliptical bikes to sell when demand surged in 2020. Today he has a San Diego warehouse packed with too many bicycles that not enough people want.

"We were like a surfer who did not catch the wave," said Mr. Pate, whose bikes start at roughly $1,500. "It's an all-hands-on-deck battle to break even for the next 18 months."

Many retailers that had too little to offer during the early stages of the pandemic now have too much of everything-from bikes and furniture to clothing and barbecue grills. They amassed the extra inventory because they expected sustained demand and supply-chain problems. What they didn't expect is that customers would shift their spending to concerts, restaurants and travel, or that rising inflation would eat away at household budgets."

Material para ajudar os compradores a meterem na cabeça que a incerteza nas previsões será cada vez maior. Por isso, há que aproximar a produção do consumo.

Este trecho:

"At Bicycle Habitat in New York City, lines formed down the block for whatever was available on a given day in the early stages of the pandemic, said owner Charlie McCorkell. Now he has roughly 2,000 bikes in stock, more than double what he would prefer; sales for 2022 are expected to be lower than 2019; and some customers are willing to walk out the door over a bike's color.

"We have a hundred black ones and no red ones," Mr. McCorkell said. "And they only want the red ones."" 

Meu Deus... este trecho fez-me recuar na memória mais de 16 anos!!!

"But suppose you want the size nine “Wonder Wings” in gray? The chances are only 80% (an industry average) that they will be in stock; and there is a good possibility (because of the longer order window) that they will never be in stock again. Not to worry, though. There are millions of size nine Wonder Wings in pink available and many more on the way because the order flow, once turned on, cannot be turned off and the replenishment cycle is so long. As a result, the shoe industry fails to get one customer in five the product he or she actually wants, while it remainders 40% of total production (pink Wonder Wing, for example) through secondary channels at much lower revenues.”"

Segue-se outro exemplo da incerteza nas previsões e das consequências das longas cadeias de fornecimento:

"Skyrocketing demand in the first few months of the pandemic convinced Mr. Pate to increase the number of bikes he ordered from manufacturers in Asia by a third. Facing warnings that lead times were getting longer for components that manufacturers needed to assemble the company’s bikes, he placed similarly high orders for 2021 and 2022 in mid 2020, much earlier than he normally would. He even had to buy a small number of components for delivery in 2023 and 2024.

“The decisions were made a long time ago under very different circumstances,” Mr. Pate said. “And the world is not the way it was back then.”"

Recordo que em Janeiro deste ano tive um cliente que me pediu apoio para implementação de um sistema de gestão ambiental, por pressão do maior cliente. 2021 foi o melhor ano de sempre para esse maior cliente na área das duas rodas. O projecto nunca chegou a arrancar porque o tal cliente cortou drasticamente as encomendas para 2022.