Demand Forecast & Commercial Planning

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Demand Planning, Demand Sensing or Commercial Planning?

Mostly every business people, being from supply chain or sales &marketing, know that an accurate demand plan is essential to have efficient supply chains, healthy inventory and, as a consequence, for securing revenue. The main goal of the plan is to find balance between having enough inventories to fulfill the demand but not too much that it would generate extra costs nor too little that sales are lost.

Nevertheless, different planning horizons have different business requirements and very frequently, the concepts behind those requirements are not very clear and difficult to integrate; we are talking about Demand Planning, Demand Sensing and Commercial Planning.

Demand Planning

Mid-term plan (n months)

Included in S&OP / IBP

Influenced by internal traits: sales history, marketing actions, campaigns and promotions

Influenced by external aspects: competitors actions, inventory locations, etc.

Goal is to create future demand visibility to support planning of raw material, production mix, distribution and order prioritization

Demand Sensing

Very short term (days or weeks) and within the month

Part of S&OE

Uses mostly internal traits to create daily forecast for the next weeks and to anticipate total sales on that month

Considers on-going orders and short term actions taken in all channels

Should guide the production scheduling for the nearest unfrozen time buckets and transportation execution, focusing on keeping products available where demand is expected

Commercial Planning

Mid-term plan (n months), it is a result of S&OP

Guides marketing and sales actions for definition of prices and campaigns

On a shorter term use, it can feed into the S&OE to determine corrective measures along the month

Most important outputs are the definition of sales targets for each representative, pricing strategies and corrective measures to ensure the delivery of the current plan.

All these capabilities are now enhanced with the use of analytics. Many factors can influence demand, such as: changes in the economy, labor force, climate, competitors positioning, seasonal events, global crises, etc. Demand planning has various dimensions: statistical forecast, product portfolio management, and sales promotion management, among others.

The best demand planning and sensing processes come from having a good management of your data, including demand information, utilizing predictive models that are accurate and constantly updated, using a proper collaboration platform and monitoring performance based on real time analysis.

DHAUZ can help you with Predictive & Demand Sensing

Dashboards - Sales and Demand Visibility

Insights and Explaining Demand Trends

Modeling Library and Impacting Factors

Analytical Demand Forecast

Assets for planning collaboration and commercial disaggregation

Demand Sensing & Execution guidance

At DHAUZ, we have many pre-implemented predictive models that allow us to speed up and get to faster results. Besides that, we have a team of expert data scientists who are capable of customizing and developing new models, which will reflect your company and your client’s specific issues or challenges.

These assets can be used as add-ons to enhance whatever tool you already have running. For those clients who are also looking for a more complete planning collaboration platform, and/or a tool to orchestrate the demand planning process, we have just what you need.

It’s important to highlight that you can have access to it all as a service. This way you will be able to apply analytical intelligence to your daily routine and constantly add value without the need to approve or implement a new tool.

Overall visibility of demand short and mid-term drivers, their causes and size of the impact

Extreme improvement on the level of accuracy in very short time, keeping and improving it with the as-a-service approach

Insights and patterns identification related to orders on hand and how they relate to new demand

Redução de níveis de stock-out e perda de produto em função de shelf, associados a um incremento de vendas em função de direção correta na execução