DEMAND PLANNING AND FORECASTING (iPLAN)
Demand planning entails much more than generating a forecast. In today¡¦s organization, Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance are often deeply involved in the process, and it is increasingly common for companies to collaborate with suppliers and customers in developing demand plans. Special consideration must be given to where a product is in its overall lifecycle as well as to the marketing and promotional events that impact demand. Whether you operate in a business-to-consumer or business-to-business environment, your marketplace is becoming more complex and faster-paced.
iPLAN delivers powerful demand planning and forecasting capabilities within a highly flexible framework that readily adapts to your evolving business needs.
iPLAN is a full-featured and highly automated demand planning and forecasting system that supports effective demand management at every point in the product lifecycle.
- Provides the full range of demand forecasting methodologies expected by best-in-class organizations.
- Dynamic event modeling methods bring additional precision to forecasting in a promotionally active marketplace.
- Specialized tools are provided to improve new product forecasting.
- Quickly and reliably selects the optimum forecasting method for each product, based on the product¡¦s unique demand pattern.
- Supports both top-down and bottom-up forecasting processes.
- Enables users to tailor different forecasting processes for unique business needs across product groups, distribution channels or for specific items and customers.
- Simple spreadsheet interfaces for demand planning collaboration and ¡§what if¡¨ analysis.
- Integrated OLAP provides users ¡§on-the-fly¡¨ analysis and reporting capabilities.
- Access to all programs, data, reports, and critical functionality such as the ability to alter forecasts is controlled by user and role-level security.