provides specialized consulting and education in the areas of Demand Management, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), and Supply Chain Analytics.   Learn more.

Demand Planning workshop for your Planners, Marketers and Sales Professionals!

This workshop will explain the methodology and process behind accurate demand forecasts and how to effectively use sales and marketing intelligence to arrive at a consensus plan. The focus will be on demand modeling using popular statistical models, the methodology to perform model diagnostics, forecast accuracy measurement and the process to incorporate market intelligence and a brief overview of Sales and Operations Planning process.

This highly informative workshop will be conducted on-site by an experienced Demand Planning expert. The workshop runs approximately two days and includes extensive materials and excel templates to take away and be used in your work.

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What is your market share?  Do you expect the market share to increase over time?  Why should the supply chain care about market planning and market share analysis?    

Market Planning is the process of sizing up your market and calculating your share versus your competitors. A Marketing Plan is the tool used to increase your share of the market through marketing activities such as advertising, branding, and promotions. Supply Chains should care about market planning models and the outputs from the market planning models presented to senior management as this affects long-term capacity planning and to build the infrastructure and the network for expansion.

A key component of Market Planning is market share forecasting. In the manufacturer to retailer to consumer model, what matters most is the shelf take-away or sales at retail. Marketing Strategies aim to maximize shelf consumption (and usage) and thus increase your share of that consumption.

The first step is calculating the total market potential for your products. The second step is to estimate your retail sales and derive your share of the total market. The third step is to forecast your base case market share as well as target market share given your advertising budget and your marketing plan. Let us use the case of a infant car seat manufacturer to illustrate this process.  Learn more...

Demand Planning Discussion Forum!

The Discussion Forum is a resource for sharing ideas and questions in Demand Planning, Forecast Metrics, Sales and Operations Planning, Supply Chain Score-carding, CPFR, Account Based Forecasting and inventory optimization topics.  This is board is moderated and questions answered by experts in the area, including Senior consultants at Demand Planning LLC.  Please visit the forum and post your questions.

Professional Supply chain events 2008

It is a very busy year for the folks in supply chain and demand planning.  There are a variety of conferences and professional meetings from now until the end of the year.

Boston APICS has a variety of professional development meetings and Plant tours of manufacturing facilities in the area. 

The Boston Chapter of APICS is hosting a tour of the Boston Scientific Distribution Center in Quincy, Ma. on Tuesday, April 15^th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.  The evening will begin with an overview presentation by the Boston Scientific management team.  more...

EyeforPharma will conduct the Pharma Business Intelligence USA Summit 2008 in  Phialdelphia between May 16 and 18. more...

Know the popular acronyms in demand planning and supply chain management.

Here is a  list of key acronyms and abbreviations used very commonly by supply chain professionals.  Some are more specific to forecasting, nevertheless this should be a useful reference.

Is calculating and reporting forecast accuracy becoming a daunting task every month? 

Although most companies use state of the art software for modeling and maintaining the demand plans, measuring and reporting the forecast accuracy as well as other supply chain metrics become an after thought.  This is not part of their process design or implementation, so this all gets left to the imagination and creativity of the planners.  So the task is left to the mercy of huge excel spreadsheets and massive downloads of item level data and complicated VLookups to make it work. 

DemandPlanning.Net provides an user-friendly tool that is highly customizable to your data model and creates analyzable reports in Excel spreadsheets with pivot capabilities.  All the metrics required are already built into this software.  It also comes with a rich set of exception management reports.  This is also available on a hosted basis where we maintain the database of forecasts and actual sales and provide the reports through a repository accessible on the web.  Please contact us for further info at 781-995-0685 or through email at info@demandplanning.net! 

SAP APO - Review and Re-energize your implementation

APO in SCM 4.1 (and SCM 5.0) is a much improved planning system compared to the previous versions of the tool itself and versus its competition.  APO offers a variety of modeling options from basic time series models to multiple linear regression models.

APO DP also offers the capability to model, forecast and manage the process by exception through

• exception alerts and
• user defined macro alerts.

It is important to leverage the full functionality of APO modeling and exception management.  If implemented correctly, you can take advantage of the many automated modeling strategies available in APO resulting in a more streamlined planning process and organization.  Learn more.

Business Planning and Forecasting

Business Forecasting takes a methodical and statistical approach to forecasting demand and primarily relies on data, technology and software to arrive at an accurate forecast.

Time Series Forecasting - Performance Measurement - Market Share Forecasting - Exception Analysis - Causal Modeling

Although Demand Planning starts with a good business forecast based on a sound statistical model, it also entails collaborative and consensus management of the entire demand information process.  Demand Planning group works with the entire Demand Chain function that is responsible for creating, generating and identifying demand. 

Business Planning - Promotional Planning - Collaborative Planning -

Vendor Managed  Inventory Process - Account Based Forecasting -

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) Process

Supply Chain Metrics

Demand Metrics - Customer Service Metrics - Inventory Metrics -

MAPE and Forecast Bias

Retail Share and POS forecasting

POS Data - Share Analysis - Market Forecasting - Market Mix Modeling - Retail Inventory

Recent Questions and Answers:

How do you go about mapping and re-defining the Metrics for your supply Chain?  What is the key driver of the supply Chain?

Supply chain metrics include customer service metrics (fill rates), inventory metrics (inventory turns, dead and near-dead inventory, inventory coverage), manufacturing planning (production volatility, manufacturing schedule adherence), and demand metrics (forecast accuracy and forecast bias.  Once defined, the question is who will own these measures.  All the measures are inter-related.  By observing the metrics, we can understand the effect of organizational bias.  More.

Is there a profile of Safety Stock Coverage required for different Customer Service levels?

Yes.  This can be calculated using statistical formulas for any particular level.  The logic is a higher customer service level will require a greater Inventory Coverage level other things being equal.  The main other things here are forecast error and Lead time.   Here is a profile of inventory coverage levels at various required service levels.  More.

Lead times are an important factor in deciding inventory levels at the receiving point.
More.