Ann’s post on Chrysler’s struggle with inventory turnover highlights the inventory problems the company was facing in late 2006, with many unsold 2006 models at a time of year when automakers should be making room for next year’s models. Chrysler’s days supply was 82 days in 2006, while Toyota’s days supply was a far superior 28 days. Chrysler suffered from poor demand forecasting, which led it to make too much inventory for a low demand.

Curious about how Chrysler is doing now, I found a graph of its more recent days supply data from its third quarter financial report. From this graph, it appears that its average days supply is in the high 60s for 2011 so far.

I also wondered about how Toyota is now performing. According to its 2011 financial report, its cost of products sold in 2011 was ¥15,985,78 million, while its inventory of finished goods was ¥715,272 million. This amounts to an inventory turnover of around 22, so if my calculations are correct, its days supply is an incredible 16 days, a highly significant improvement from 2006. Though Chrysler had shortened its days supply over the past five years, perhaps it needs to take a cue from Toyota to improve even more.

The eight-month-old web retailer Moda Operandi is capitalizing on an untapped market segment of consumers who want pieces fresh off the runway.

Their business model involves an online Trunk Show, just days after a designer’s show, in which members – which currently number around 50,000 – can pre-order any piece from the collection. The designer produces the pieces to order and delivers them to Moda Operandi, which packages them and ships them to the customer.

Although this supply chain involves an intermediate step between supplier and consumer, it does involve the consumer placing orders which are fulfilled directly by the designer. This is advantageous because it allows consumers access to pieces which may have never been produced otherwise; and many pieces which do end up being sold in stores have their design “edited” to be more accessible, or are only sold in common sizes. Thus Moda Operandi provides a solution to a problem which has plagued both designers and consumers.

By offering their service online, Moda Operandi is jumping onto an e-commerce fashion bandwagon which is likely to grow. This medium is rich with opportunities such as Moda Operandi’s partnership with Vogue; now vogue.com‘s runway photos link to Moda Operandi’s site.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt commented this week that Google+ will not be able to beat Facebook at Facebook’s own game – so Google is trying to “find a new problem and do that much better” than Facebook.

But so far, it seems that Google+ is playing a similar game as Facebook, with undeniable similarities in its structure and layout and perhaps even its early strategy, “tracing a path similar to Facebook’s initial growth — building excitement in a core group of early adopters,” according to Michael Nardis, head of the research organization YouGov. Google’s tactic was to implement an initial invite-only phase, creating an exclusivity that helped build hype, though this also meant that invitees often found a social network that had few people to socialize with.

Still, after around three months of operation, Google+ boasts 50 million users. It does have unique features to tout above Facebook, such as “Circles” instead of a friends list and “Hangouts” for group video chat, something that other services such as Skype charge for. And Google+ is continuing to move forward; it opened to the public on September 20 and has introduced circle sharing to help ameliorate the problem for Facebook users of rebuilding a contacts list.

A study from Babson College has found no correlation between the performance of a new business and whether a business plan was written prior to its launch. This may be surprising to some, though others do contend that a full business plan is unnecessary, such as the author of this blog post from The Small Business Blog.

However, this study is far from an indication that business plans are never beneficial. Abusiness plan has a multitude of uses for circumstances other than beginning a business, such as while managing, growing, or exiting one. In addition, the study acknowledges that a business plan could be a good idea if the entrepreneur needs to raise a significant amount of capital, which is not an uncommon situation – though another study from the University of Maryland contends that business plans do not influence the decisions of venture capitalists.

It is important to note, however, that the studies may be flawed for various reasons, including their fairly narrow data samples – in the Babson College study, only 116 ventures, all of which were begun by Babson College alums, and in the University of Maryland study, 700 dot-com business plans during the Internet bubble.