Nike’s Supply Chain: Failure and Eventual Success

What factors led to the i2 Technologies implementation being highly complex project? Were the increased complexities really necessary?

The implementation of i2 technologies was intended to forecast sales and suggest how the sales can be improved. The system seemed complex due a variety of reasons. The main reason was the input of many variables which made the functioning of the system really complicated. I think that some of the data variables that were input were unnecessary and could have been avoided. The results of the forecast could have been improved and hence improving the supply chain. The amount of data in smaller chunks could have worked well in my opinion. Also, manufacturing variables could have been utilized more efficiently.

What was wrong with Nike relying heavily on automatic statistical forecasts generation by the i2 technologies’ software?

I think that the expectations were a bit unrealistic and the issues involved in the downward implementation of the i2 software system could have been performed a lot more efficiently. Due to an ill efficient implementation of the i2 system, the proper balance of manufacturing the products and their sales was not maintained.

Another issue at Nike was the quality of the data that was fed in to the system. To achieve accurate results, you have to feed the automatic system quality data, which was not made possible. Therefore, quality results were not achieved.