Regardless of who you are, customers lie at the centre of your universe. We are living in world of people empowered by choice. This combined with an austere economic climate requires businesses to deliver higher service levels at a lower cost with less investment in inventory. So exactly why is this a seemingly impossible task? First we need to understand how businesses have evolved. In what we might call ‘the age of manufacturing’ – 1900 to 1960 – there were few variants to any manufactured item. Business was ‘product led’, forecasting was all but irrelevant and, quite simply, if a…