Eventually the company decided to run parallel pilots with two key strategic trade partner, with the following precautions. The pilots were to adopt a cautious crawl’ walk, and run approach, starting with only one product category and gradually rolling out to additional products. The intention was to grab low-hanging fruit first by setting collaboration “alert” parameters at a comfortable level. The alert parameters center primarily around flags that are generated by the collaboration support system when the difference between the forecasts of Whirlpool and its trading partners exceeds a pre-defined threshold. By making these parameters loose at the outset, the pilot teams could get at the big potential misses in forecasting without being overwhelmed with too much data.