Abstract:Supply chain collaborations have traditionally been enabled by inter-organizational systems such as electronic data interchanges (EDI) and business-to-business (B2B) platforms. Demand information sharing has been one of the cornerstones of these efforts. However, such collaborations are not always realized due to implementation impediments (e.g., cost, training, etc.) or lack of trust between involved firms. In this paper, we examine a recent innovative program that exploits a ubiquitous mobile phone technology to acquire demand information directly from consumers. However, the information acquired from consumers is a censored version of the information that could be acquired through supply chain collaboration. We present a simple procedure to “recover” the true demand information over time from that acquired from consumers. We show that the proposed procedure is indeed an effective substitute for supply chain collaboration in a highly variable but low demand situation where the fill rate is high. Using real-life data from a manufacturer in China that has implemented a mobile app (WeChat) program for learning consumer demand information, we demonstrate the value of such a mobile app program can be substantial.