PART 1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Sport Obermeyer must maintain and for that matter increase our hold on the skiwear industry. For that objective to be met it has been determined that changes must occur on a couple of fronts. First an improved forecasting technique must be implemented. Having hot items stock out causing potential customers to purchase competitors product is unacceptable. Taking each buying committee members forecast into account to create an average demand forecast has created a good starting point With the addition of our preferred retailers at the table I feel we would have an even better grip on the customer demands. I would also implement an electronic data communication at the point of sale. This would provide us with real time numbers, numbers that we presently don’t have during our November meetings this would only aid us in our forecasting, as well as during the season we would be able to see which items are selling well early in the season. The second issue is production planning, with long lead times on materials, large minimum orders, a short product life cycle (less than 1 year), and a very large planning cycle (2 years). We must seek out partnerships with raw material providers to facilitate shorter lead times. We must reduce the number of vendors we use. Work with Chinese facilities to reduce minimum orders. With these changes we will see a better understanding of customer demand and the ability to react to demand in a more timely fashion, this is imperative for Sport Obermeyer to continue its succeed.

PART TWO ISSUE IDENTIFICATION

Immediate issues 1. Committing to specific production quantities with the use of only experience, intuition, speculation and limited data. Sport Obermeyer has “scant” information about how the market would react to the new line. Sport Obermeyer doesn’t even have any clear indicators about how people are