Tim Cook Quotes

We can serve our customers well only if our buying jobs are right. You cannot sell if you haven't ordered wanted goods into your store.

It was Dell who came out with their build-on-demand process, where they are able to keep a zero balance inventory. That means they don't purchase parts until an order is received. That is a way to greatly reduced overhead, since you don't need to warehouse parts or overstock parts you may not end up using.

Retailing, it's always true that there is some items that I wish we had a lot more of like the iPod and there is some items I wish we had a lot less of.

You can find Chobani in every major supermarket, in club stores, convenience stores and airports. But we're not everywhere yet. We have been struggling with keeping up with demand.

It took us three years to even come close to catching up with the demand a little bit.

In the past, I had the marketing know how to get people to talk about my products, but I didn't have the infrastructure or logistics to fulfill the demand properly.

Most people assume that a record shop's success lies in selling records. In fact, Virgin's success both in mail order and the record shops lay in skill at buying records.

Strapped by tight credit and plummeting sales, businesses have overhauled the way they manage supply chains, inventory, production practices and staffing.

We've tapped into a huge demand, and it's up to us to fulfill that demand and to be creative doing it.

When you went into a Boston Chicken and ordered quarter-chicken, white, with mash and corn, when that was rung up, that would signal all the way along the supply chain the need for more potatoes to be put on a truck a thousand miles away.

Stores don't order merchandise unless they think they can sell it right away. Manufacturers and builders don't produce unless they have buyers lined up. My business contacts describe this as a paradigm shift and they believe it's permanent.

Trying to move the volume of products we're talking about from place to place to get it ultimately into the customer's hands, to price these items, to market these items, I think the retail business is incredibly complex. But if you get it right, it's a beautiful thing.

You need to be ahead of the game just enough so that you can have what people want in the shops when they want it.

Assuming normal winter weather, we currently anticipate the coal markets to remain difficult through 2015; while we always strive to operate a full capacity in this environment, it may be necessary to delay our production growth to match the market.

There are still a lot of cases in the world where you order something and then you see 'Delivery will be in 8-12 weeks.' This is because of the faxes and forms that still exist.

Nothing exists if a store doesn't buy it and you're not able to get it.

With Illum, we're able to start to customize that supply chain in a very deep way... to rethink the entire imaging pipeline.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

Supply always comes on the heels of demand.

The people of this country have been erroneously encouraged to believe that they could keep on increasing the output of farm and factory indefinitely and that some magician would find ways and means for that increased output to be consumed with reasonable profit to the producer.

If we intend to have the trade of the world, … we must be in a capacity of serving all markets and all humours.

For physical goods, there are costs associated with logistics and lead times, owing to inventories and poor forecasts of the market. With digital capital-intensive technology, however, production will inevitably move toward the final market, wherever it is. This re-localization constitutes a major shift in the structure of global supply networks.

If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that - although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.

Has anyone actually asked the customer if they want to have something available directly after the show? You hear that three bags are going to be released tomorrow in five shops, so you produce 15 bags. How many customers are you going to satisfy with that? Fifteen!

The purpose of business is to make a reasonable return by making products and services that people want and value. If you are not, you are wasting resources.