A recent article illustrates on the ’sense’ and ‘respond’ practice adopted by 7-Eleven in Japan. This process is based much on a demographic research where a product corresponds to the age and gender of a person. This is sense or the consumer demand which is responded by a mix-match of having the stock of such products and arrangement of these products in its 10,000 stores. When Stanford Business School professor Seungjin Whang says: You deliver what the customer wants before demand evaporates.
Whang’s studies reveals certain products are stocked in the stores as per the needs and reactions of the consumers. As per Stephanie Clifford:
These are large companies, of course. But with databases like those from IBM, Tibco, or Teradata offering a high level of sophistication and becoming increasingly affordable, entrepreneurs can think about using the same techniques.
