Demand Planning
Empower your global Demand Planners with powerful algorithms and effective means for collaboration.
Predicting the future demand is a difficult and time-consuming process. Outperform Planning enables the demand planner to segment the forecasting process in a simple way and apply different techniques for generating a demand plan. The techniques range from applying the forecasting engine, applying a heuristic based on recent order patterns or collaborating with customers and account managers or applying a management directive to a group of customers/products.
Benefits
With the simple and intuitive way of managing the demand planning process, we have achieved a higher level of collaboration between salespersons and demand planners.
Forecasting
Outperform Planning gives you the freedom to work on any aggregation level that matters for your business in a particular area. Forecasts are generated by analyzing historical sales patterns. Outperform Planning takes the predictable trends and determines their influence on the demand history to predict their influence on future sales.
Seasonality
The forecasting engine detects seasonality by using a moving average over the periods. Determines their average percentage deviation from the mean over an aggregated period, averages and normalizes this over the entire historic horizon. Seasonality is for a given cycle length considered to be relevant when the standard percentage deviation exceeds 5%. If so, demand history is adjusted for these deviations.
Inflation
Applies when the demand is measured in monetary units. Due to inflation, the money value of sales tends to grow more than the actual growth of the business, disturbing the picture. In this case, demand is deflated by converting everything to Net Present Value. This requires a history of inflation as well as a reliable prediction of inflation in the future usually from government sources.
Demography
Some products appeal to a particular age or income group. The income per capita and other demographic trends in a region influence the demand, beyond the product’s intrinsic growth.