DEMAND PLANNING AND FORECASTING (iPLAN)
The pace of new product introduction is making traditional, history-based, demand forecasting more difficult as product life spans shrink. The situation is further complicated by the growth of promotional and event marketing activities to drive sales.
You must be able to reliably forecast new product demand with little or no actual history of the new product as reference, and within the lifecycle of the product you must be able to incorporate the impact of promotions and other demand-influencing events with little direct history of the product in question.
iPLAN offers the advanced modeling features needed to incorporate causal factors into the forecast for both new products and in-line promotions. We have taken great care to leverage proven statistical methodologies for producing these forecasts and making these features accessible to business users.
Modern demand management entails much more than generating a simple forecast. In today’s demand-driven organization multiple departments can be deeply involved in the process – Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance – and it is becoming increasingly common for companies to collaborate with suppliers and customers in developing demand plans.
From an operational perspective it is advantageous to operate against a single, common forecast of demand, but other specialized forecasts are often required that reflect the expected future of other business factors. Finance, for example, may require a net revenue forecast while marketing can extract great value of a forecast of total market demand for a product category. As a result, it is not uncommon for organizations to manage several different forecasts for different purposes on different systems and spreadsheets.
iPLAN is the first solution to give companies the ability to manage multiple different forecasts from different demand streams in a practical and cost-effective manner.