Since the industrial, the dominant business model has required anticipation of what customers will demand in the future. Because information concerning purchase behavior was not readily available and firms loosely linked together in a channel of distribution did not feel compelled to share their plain, business operations were driven by forecasts and promotional plans. since the forecast results were more often than not wrong, considerable discontinuities existed between what firms planned to do and what they, in fact, ended up doing. Such discontinuity typically resulted in unplanned inventory. Because of high cost and risk associated with conducting business on an anticipatory basis, the prevailing relationship between trading partners was adversarial; each firm needed to protect its own interest