The Future of Demand Planning

What is the Future of Demand Planning?

The future of demand planning is bright. With the increasing amount of data available and the advances in technology, more sophisticated tools and methods will become available to help with demand planning. These tools will allow companies to anticipate customer demands better, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction. Additionally, leveraging data to understand customer behavior and create better forecasting models will continue to enhance the effectiveness of demand planning.

Can You Accurately Forecast Demand when your Business Constantly Changes?

Forecasting demand accurately when a business is continuously changing is possible. Organizations can use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to generate accurate predictions to track customer behavior, market trends, and other data points. Additionally, businesses can use historical data and customer feedback to help inform their forecasts. Ultimately, the key to accurately predicting demand is having access to the correct data and using the proper process to interpret that data.

What is a Best Practice Demand Planning Process?

A best practice demand planning process typically involves several steps: gathering data, analyzing demand, forecasting, refining forecasts, and creating plans. Data gathering consists in collecting data on past sales and other related information, such as customer orders and shipments. Demand analysis helps to identify trends, seasonality, and different patterns in the data. Forecasting is predicting future demand based on the gathered data and analysis. Refining forecasts involves adjusting the estimates based on sales performance, customer feedback, and other factors. Finally, plans are created to ensure that the organization meets customer demand.

Becoming a Customer-Centric Organization

Customer-centric demand management is a strategy used by organizations to understand their customers' needs and demands better and then use that knowledge to develop strategies to meet those demands. This strategy is focused on understanding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors to create products and services that meet their needs and wants. It combines market segmentation, customer segmentation, customer analytics, customer experience design, and customer engagement to create a tailored approach to each customer's needs. Demand sensing, predicting, and shaping are critical parts of a customer-centric approach.

Sensing, predicting and shaping demand are critical parts of a customer-centric approach. We have many industry use cases that help balance supply and demand through more precise planning. We help our clients enable techniques such as market segmentation, customer segmentation, customer analytics, customer experience design, and customer engagement to create a tailored approach to meeting each customer's needs.

Stay tuned for additional extensions to this Demand Management Viewpoint to dive deeper into sensing, predicting, and shaping future demand.