Demand Planning

Adroit’s Demand Planning and Forecasting

Today’s business environment demands rapid fulfillment of customer orders while post-pandemic global supply chain issues have increased lead times for critical raw materials. The use of Demand Forecasting is more important than ever to enable your businesses to anticipate what your customer demand will look like in the future to enable you to properly plan your material purchases, capacity, and production orders. A faulty demand planning and forecasting process can result in too much or too little inventory and adversely affect your business.

If you’re new to demand forecasting and keen to make it a fixture of your business, our guide can help. Here, we’ll be covering what demand forecasting is, why it’s important, and how to implement it alongside your ongoing supply chain management strategy.

Solutions

Decreased Ambiguity: As we embark on what seems like the final descent of the 2020 pandemic, uncertainty still arises when it comes to supply chain management and business forecasting. The use of demand forecasting alleviates the ambiguity, allowing your supply chain functions to be carried out properly, ensuring that the proper people on your team are better equipped to make effective decisions that keep business growth flourishing.

Better Supply Framework: With any business, there are inevitable highs and lows, and this impacts the supply and demand forecasting throughout the business year. Preparing for these ups and downs ensures your business is prepared and stable, creating a healthy supply infrastructure. Demand Forecasting creates a strong supply chain management process that optimizes capacity, and stock revival, and increases productivity and accuracy with the proper personnel who are in charge.

Increased Revenue: With the proper traceability and tracking forecasting tools, you can receive accurate data from previous years, creating an understanding of when products are likely to sell and what volumes they were sold at. Having the proper demand forecasting tools set in place allows you to have optimal product availability, ensuring you never miss a sale.

Streamlined Fulfillment Process: Demand forecasting benefits a business from all angles. Having a streamlined fulfillment process that is set up with the proper demand forecasting tools allows for your products to be available on time, increasing customer satisfaction. Improving your fulfillment process with demand forecasting makes your employees less stressed, encourages repeat customers, and boosts your revenue.

Tool Selection

We can broadly categorize planning/forecasting toolsets into three groups:

Simple Single Channel

Consume history and generate a statistical forecast into an excel type format

Top Down/Bottom Up Consensus

• Consume history, segment the history by channel, customer type, product groups etc. • Generate a bottom-up statistical forecast • Modify forecast segments via adjustments • Factor in promotions and other factors • Finalize and publish forecast

Integrated Business Planning Suite

• Incorporate all of the top down/bottom-up consensus forecasting • Facilitate a full sales and operations planning process

Adroit North America can help you to evaluate and select the proper forecasting/planning tool for your organization.

Planning as a Service

Supply chain planning and production scheduling are critical processes for food processors and for distributors supply chain planning is the life blood of the business. Yet, as critical as they are, many companies are simply “getting by” or continuing to thrash among a sea of last-minute reactions to changes in demand or supply. The scramble to meet service levels is paramount yet despite the criticality the planners and schedulers suffer with spreadsheets to then feed the ERP system with the latest plan that is only doomed to fail. The result is turnover in the planning and scheduling positions or being held hostage by that one critical employee with the massive “secret sauce” spreadsheet. There is a better way – Adroit Supply Chain’s Planning as a Service solution.

Adroit’s Planning as a Service solution consists of a team of Planning and Scheduling specialists with deep experience in their field. Our specialists are adept with a range of integrated business planning solutions as well as many of the leading ERP solutions. Adroit embeds with your team on a fractional basis. We assess your supply chain requirements, your demand profile, your products and attributes, sequencing requirements, logistical networks, and more. We “lift and shift” to today’s leading technology if it makes sense or work to optimize the solutions you have. In most cases, total operational costs are comparable to current planning budgets with significant improvements in service levels, inventory turns, utilization, operational effectiveness, and operational throughout.

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