Demand Planning can be defined as the art and science of forecasting customer demand so the corporate supply chain can produce and deliver products and services efficiently to be at the right place, right time, and in the right quantities.

Please contact us to schedule a one-hour consult to discuss True Demand and the best practices in a demand planning process.  Your True demand download will be available once you complete the below info.

Since customer demand is a key ingredient of Demand Planning, the Sales Forecasting process, and Key Account Planning are important components of the demand planning program.  This is only possible if Sales Forecast intelligence can be obtained without much interruption to the SalesForce.  

Before designing a demand planning program, you should ask the Forecast customer about the content and characteristics of the demand plan. Since Demand planning is customer-driven, a Sales Forecasting Process is an integral part of this initiative.  

The demand planning process should be designed to drive more demand clarity and demand visibility to the organization.  The demand plan should have consensus from all organizational functions on the demand side.  

Our guiding objective is to design a best-in-class process to deliver an accurate, one-number plan to the Supply Chain!  

Demand Planning & Forecasting Consulting - Key Steps in Process Design

• Assess the demand forecast needs of the down-stream customer  
• Identify roles and responsibilities of the organization on the demand side including Sales, Marketing, Product Development and Category Management  
• Map historical data, clean and harmonize the data for Statistical modeling
• Recommend appropriate demand forecast models and help tune statistical models to arrive at unbiased baseline forecasts.  See more details on model tuning.  
• Design the sub-process for Sales Forecasting including promotional planning and Event Modeling and integrate it with the CRM process in the organization. Event Modeling can be for repeatable promotional events and holiday spikes but can also be used for modeling Black Swan events.  See the Blog entry on Black Swans.  
• Design consensus process and define appropriate review reports.  
• Define the rules for forecast reconciliation and demand consensus  
• Define exception management for demand and supply volatility. Our focus is to enable you to manage the process by exception. We have data mining capabilities to dig into your process and help you develop exception management  
• Define the process for identifying supply constraints and reverse feed-back. Demand Management is a continuous process and thrives on constant communication, feedback and action. We help you implement processes that are self-sustaining and continuously improving  
• Define holistic metrics and processes for continuous improvement. We help you design end-to-end Value Chain Metrics including key measurements for the demand chain. It is important to measure your entire demand chain not just the demand planners  

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