Trading partners manage the development of a single shared forecast of consumer demand that drives planning across the value chain. Trading partners jointly commit to the shared forecast through risk sharing in the removal of supply process constraints . The Trading Partner Framework One key finding that has come out of the VMI and jointly managed inventory programs is that no single business process fits all trading partners or all situations between trading partners.
Trading partners have different competencies based on their strategies and investments.
They also have different sources of information and different views of the market place. CPFR is structured as a set of scenarios or CPFR process alternatives for trading partners to use. The scenarios recognize key process competencies that must be addressed by the trading partners to determine which company should lead core process activities. A set of trading partners may choose to use more than one scenario in their partnership framework, depending on the nature of the products, the impacts of promotional or seasonal processes, or the level of importance of the steps to either trading partner. A Single Forecast of Consumer Demand Retailers and manufacturers have different views of the marketplace.