Best and Worst Practices in Demand Planning

The New Jersey Chapter of APICS invited me to present a one-day training workshop that elaborates on the best practices speech I have been giving this Fall. I spoke at the Vermont Chapter and later at the Buffalo Chapter with very lively audiences eager to learn more about demand planning. This one-day workshop is patterned as a Training workshop for Demand Planning Practitioners. We talk about the best practices and some functional details of how to adopt these practices. After lunch, we will also have an interactive whiteboarding session to compile a list of worst practices in demand planning.  Just list those that we want to stay away from. This will be held at the Holiday Inn at Totowa, NJ on January 13th.  This will be followed by a PDM that evening where I will address the chapter members on "Customer Focused Supply Chain Collaboration". An outline of the morning session at the seminar:

2. All you need to know about forecasts, you needto start from the Data Garden. Understand yourdata and make appropriate adjustments before beginningthe forecast process. • Data Analysis for forecasting • Data Requirements for Demand Planning • Graphical review of the Data• Central Tendency and measures ofDispersion• Outliers and Missing Data • Structural Changes and Data Shifts 3. Measure to mature! You cannot improve theprocess unless you measure where it is right now.  Design and deploy the right set of demand Metrics. • Importance of measuring forecast performance• Management Reporting and Continuous Improvement

• Forecast Bias and Sku Mix Error (SME). You can find more info at http://demandplanning.net/demand_planning_oneday_nj.htm. Perhaps this will be an opportunity for us to connect and share the best practices in planning!