| Dan, when we have settled into a regular production mode, (soon,
but not yet), you should be able to get OTD ships for a fiscal month,
each week of the fiscal month. Let's use December as an example.
At the beginning of week 2 of December, you would be able to obtain
data for week one of Dec. At the beginning of week 3 of December,
you would be able to obtain data for the first two weeks of December,
and so it grows. Each week more data coming in.
From an end user perspective, I would think most users would wait
until the first week after the close of a fiscal month to pull data.
Concerning late updates, or the trickle in problem....my recommendation
to each user is to monitor the products you are interested in for
a few months. Another example: For December, pull the data each
week for five or six weeks in a row. See how the numbers change.
If your numbers are stable right after the close of a month, then
that might be the best time to pull data. The trickle in effect,
is caused by problems with an order in the upfront order processing
systems that feed us data. There is nothing we can do to fix it
systemically. Our objective as an info center is to obtain the
data as soon as it is available. This is why we structured the
processing of OTD quite differently from our other types of data.
OTD is interesting because you can get this very early look at data,
(before the fiscal month even closes), and you can get a very complete
look at data for a given month as the year goes on. This should
be extremely useful for product trends, lifecyle issues.
Hope this helps. As a backup, you can refer to your user guide,
Available Data section, pages c.4-1, c.4-2.
Carol Pratt
|