Demand Planning is the science of accurately forecasting the demand for your supply chain. In this workshop, you will learn how to develop a baseline statistical forecast and leverage a collaborative process to add customer intelligence.

The result is a more accurate plan that may include promotional activity, customer intelligence, and display activity. An accurate demand plan helps you reduce inventory costs and increase customer service levels. When properly implemented and used in the Value Chain Process, the demand plan helps create a lean and customer centric supply chain.

In this module, we discuss:

Modeling – Smoothing models 

1. Time series Averages
2. Smoothing Methods
3. Exponential Smoothing
4. Decomposition Models
5. Brief introduction to ARIMA models and causal Models

Demand Forecasting Error Metrics

1. Mean Absolute Deviation & Mean Error
2. Mean Percentage Error & Mean Absolute Percentage Error
3. Weighted Mean Percentage Error
4. Mean Squared Error
5. Forecast Bias
6. Appearance and Expected Value of Error

Brief introduction to S&OP

1. Core components of S&OP
2. Demand and Supply balancing
3. Communication of constraints 
4. Setting up the S&OP calendar