Forecast for any time unit or item in one database. Easily constrain orders by shipping capacities, seasonality, material shortages, labor, and warehouse space. Stay in control by seeing demand forecasts, history, and on-hand inventory all in one screen. Demand Sensing: Create more accurate near-future forecasts on a daily basis by using detailed short-term demand data. Evaluate big data in a structured way so that you can recognize complex patterns and demand signals—and then deploy your inventory in ways that satisfy customers. Causal Forecasting: Use machine learning to identify patterns and automatically present decisions that could free up millions of dollars in working capital. Improve the accuracy of your forecasts by incorporating data points that are outside your company's control. Use advanced modeling techniques to evaluate multiple inventory strategies, compare their outcomes—and then make a plan that helps you reduce inventory by 10 to 30 percent. Lifecycle Planning: Launch products successfully—and maximize your margins from product sunsets.
These tools can also generate a demand plan based on historical data and predict future demand. Improved collaboration. A demand planning system can help improve communication between a company's supply chain and other areas of operations, including sales, marketing and finance. This can lead to the creation of action plans for different scenarios to enhance overall productivity. Cost control. Demand forecasts reduce costs by preparing effective inventory-stocking plans. This feature prevents inventory overstocking while focusing on high-profit inventory items. Trend analysis. In addition to controlling costs, trend analysis features can generate forecasts by capturing historical data and combining it with data related to seasonal variation and promotions. These forecasts can help prevent sales loss due to lack of inventory. Evaluating Demand Planning and Forecasting Software Evaluating demand planning and forecasting software requires an assessment of the functionality and its value to the planning process.
Many businesses are now opting for cloud-based systems that are hosted by the vendor and enable users to run the software entirely via web browser. Vendors that provide cloud-based demand planning and forecasting software include Fishbowl, SAP, S2K and Infor. Digital monitoring. With the increasing globalization of the supply chain, companies face challenges such as delays, longer delivery times, degraded quality and higher costs. To tackle these challenges and maintain visibility and connectivity across the entire supply chain, many demand planning and forecasting software solutions offer a digital monitoring feature that provides real-time updates. Artificial intelligence. The supply chain for global companies is complex and constantly evolving, which means it is susceptible to errors that can cost millions, if not billions of dollars. To combat this, some vendors are introducing features that are capable of finding and correcting both historic and live supply chain data. For example, vendor Rulex introduced an AI software solution in September 2016 that can automatically detect and correct errors in supply chain data.
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Innovative Solutions for the New Marketplace Are you looking forward or backward? In today's marketplace customer demand is constantly changing; driven by the growing influence of promotions and new items, multi-channel marketing, and the impact of social media. This is a huge challenge and an opportunity for wholesale and retail businesses. Unfortunately, for most companies their demand forecasting solutions are out of date. Older forecasting systems were designed to look backward, not forward. These systems may utilize simplified math or even spreadsheets for demand forecasting, which is a huge weaknesses. Legacy, old technology forecasting systems have very poor or no analytics for identifying demand trends. They also track demand shaping events and baseline demand poorly. This causes low forecast accuracy and bad buying decisions that translate into customer service issues, higher product costs and lost sales. How do you respond to customer-demand changes and deliver the high level of service they expect?