Forecast Management: Go Beyond Spreadsheets for Demand Planning Success

Spreadsheets can meet many basic needs. But if your company is serious about sales forecasting, you need a demand planning solution that can provide strategic value, increase your visibility into the supply chain management process, and drive your growth.

Demand Solutions Forecast Management goes well beyond spreadsheets by delivering powerful demand planning and inventory planning functionality. Our native business intelligence helps you make better decisions by giving you insights and analysis on the overall health of your business. That’s why customers in more than 75 countries rely on us for sales forecasting solutions that are based on intuitive and highly effective formulas. When you go beyond spreadsheets for better inventory planning, you can finally achieve a balance between inventory investment and optimal customer service levels — leading to more efficient and profitable supply chain management.

Thanks to Demand Solutions’ built-in social collaboration functionality. you can easily share your forecasts with all your stakeholders. And because the Demand Solutions platform is now available as a cloud-based solution. you can get powerful forecast management functionality without making an up-front investment in software licenses and implementation.

Form a Consolidated Product View for Better Decision-Making

Some sales forecasting and demand planning systems require your IT department to hard-code your product family structures or pyramid relationships. Demand Solutions Forecast Management is different. With Forecast Management, you can define your groupings and combine groups of items into a consolidated view that facilitates better inventory planning and decision-making.

As soon as you go live with the on-premise or cloud-based version of Forecast Management, you can define and create your own product families, reflecting the dynamic ways your managers across the sales, marketing, production planning, purchasing and finance departments view your business. From there, you can easily get accurate answers to any question, such as:

• What are my total sales by brand? In dollars? In euros? In any currency?
• What’s the current fiscal-year projection for each business unit and the entire company?
• Which segment of our business projects the best growth this year?
• Which items have the highest and fewest inventory turns?

• Who are my most profitable customers?

Add Insight to Your Inventory Planning

Get 360-degree insight for faster, better decision-making

Don’t take the 80/20 principle for granted in your sales forecasting and inventory planning. Demand Solutions Forecast Management offers ABC Analysis that can rank any element of your business — such as items, customers, or product families — to help you identify profitable opportunities and weed out underperformers. Imagine how much you could improve your decision-making abilities if you discovered that 90% of your revenue comes from just 10% of your customers — or that the bottom 40% of your items account for just 1% of your gross margins.

Manage new products objectively

It’s tough to forecast new or repositioned products accurately. But it’s just as challenging to be objective about their prospects. The Curves feature in Demand Solutions Forecast Management lets you forecast new products by cloning the demand pattern from similar products. You can then update your forecasts by applying initial sales. In addition, the Supersession feature helps improve your inventory planning by giving you the tools to closely manage product phase-outs and phase-ins.

Fine-tune your planning process

We understand that across your company, many managers will have insight — and we know this will influence outcomes. That’s why Demand Solutions accepts varied inputs — including customer sales forecasts, management overrides, anecdotal notes about future developments and promotional curves — that will help ensure detailed, accurate sales forecasts.

Exchange data with any ERP system

Manufacturers and distributors use Demand Solutions as the demand forecasting front end to virtually every ERP package. It’s easy to interface Demand Solutions with your existing systems and to move your data into and out of the platform. Our User-Definable Import/Export utility enables you to point and click to define the data you’re importing or exporting. And the Demand Solutions Batch Builder is an intuitive tool for scripting your repetitive procedures.

Deploy dashboards for better response

Demand Solutions Forecast Management contains all the sales forecasting data you need for smart business decisions. The Dashboards feature lets you easily view summary data to drive inventory optimization and profits. Customizable by job function, Dashboards give your planners the visibility to make quick decisions and to present sales forecasting information in the many formats that management requires.