Introduction
Management of demand is increasingly recognised as a key issue in the improving the
efficiency of supply chain operations. There has been considerable work in both the
academic and practitioner fields as to how to improve the management of demand,
ranging from the early work on demand amplification by Forrester (1958) to a more
recent initiatives in ECR (Corsten and Kumar, 2005) and collaborative planning
forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) (Seifert, 2004) aimed at integrating demand
management across various levels of the supply chain. This paper reports on research
that has been carried out in six UK agri-food chains, each spanning the entire chain
from farm production to consumer, in which detailed studies of demand management
practices and systems have been undertaken.
The UK agri-food industry is undergoing a period of intense change due to a
number of macro influences including reforms of the European union common
agriculture policy (CAP), increasing concentration of demand into a small number of