I was channel-surfing the other night until Dean Martin stopped me.

Actually it was an infomercial for a complete set of Dean Martin celebrity roasts, now out on DVD. Being a Rat Pack fan, I was trapped. There on my screen yukking it up with Dean was every big celebrity I grew up watching, either on Dean's show, on Ed Sullivan or on the Hollywood Palace (all of which carbon dates me to somewhere in the Pleistocene period).

“This is a limited time offer,” Tim Conway admonished (who, for you Holocenic readers out there, is best known as Ensign Parker on McHale's Navy, a 60s sitcom. The series was set during WWII (at least THAT predates me). “Order in the next half hour before we put these gems back into our vaults,” Conway added. The message was, you'll never get this opportunity again in your lifetime—which, judging by their target market, even if they put these gems away for a couple years, they're probably right.

I won't tell you if I fell for the “limited time offer” bit, but I will tell you that LTOs are a real phenomenon in the retail industry. While researching my report, I heard that LTOs are a critical growth area for retail chain operators, particularly in the fast-food sector of retail.

There was a panel discussion on this topic at the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association's annual Chain Operator's Exchange (COEX) recently. Six supply chain executives chewed over the importance of sharing supply chain data to “drive exponential savings gains from the logistics process.”

The problem with retail supply chains, particularly in foodservice, is human nature. Human nature, from an inventory manager's perspective, is that a franchisee doesn't want to risk running out of product and disappointing customers. So, especially where LTOs are concerned, they'll probably forecast a greater demand than they expect so they aren't short. The distributor is also “incentivized” to not run out of product because they don't want to disappoint their chain operator customers. That means they'll probably inflate their orders to the suppliers. So, the order that started with the franchisee is dwarfed by what ends up getting stored in pockets of this supply network.

Hank Lambert, with Arrowstream, a provider of supply chain software to the foodservice industry, says one thing that differentiates the foodservice supply chain from other verticals has been the absence of real-time information. Data from distributor sales out to individual stores is one thing, but the holy grail is getting data from POS terminals in the restaurants fed back into the system on a real-time basis so distributors and suppliers can have visibility into how the product's moving out the door.

Knowing how much supply chain execution software has evolved over the last decade, I don't think the foodservice industry will have to wait as long for their holy grail as I'll wait for Dean Martin's Limited-Time-Only Celebrity Roasts to come back out of the vaults again.