Gone Are the Days of Traditional Demand Planning Processes

“…we must know what the demand is on an everyday occurrence.”: Rick Jeffcoat, Hubbell

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Since it's true that you can't plan the customer, demand-driven leaders are implementing processes, supported by the appropriate technology, to ensure their supply networks are pulled by demand.

Problem

No matter what business you're in, you're likely facing increasing customer expectations, declining customer loyalty and an overall rise in demand volatility. It's never been harder to make and keep customer commitments.

Need

More than ever, closer coordination between the demand and supply sides of your business is required to consistently (and profitably!) deliver to the customer.

While forecasting based on past history still plays a role as an input into the demand planning process, companies need better tools to collaborate more closely on demand, pulling all inputs together and ensuring all stakeholders have timely information on the changing demand situation.

Solution

Core to RapidResponse® are demand planning and management capabilities that facilitate a collaborative and integrated demand and supply planning process supported by proactive monitoring and swift response to demand plan variances.

Founded on an extensive and fully integrated analytics engine, a control tower solution using RapidResponse supports multiple demand management functions from a single product:

Consensus forecasting
Customer collaboration
Demand forecast creation
Forecast changes
Inventory management
New product introductions

Order changes
Demand prioritization
Order promising/slotting
Supply allocations
Supply disruptions
Trend analysis

Benefit

Customers are achieving a competitive advantage by realizing breakthrough performance across multiple operations performance metrics. Specific benefits include:

Improved demand forecast accuracy
Superior responsiveness to customers
Early identification of demand and supply misalignments
Visibility into the impact of demand changes on revenue, inventory, and customer service
Improved understanding of demand trends
Ability to maximize revenue opportunities to drive growth

An agile supply chain that can respond to unexpected change and volatile customer demands requires a supporting technology solution that is equally as agile. Learn more about the technology behind RapidResponse.

Bring the two sides of the house together—put demand and supply, and the people responsible for them, in one place.

While sales and operations planning (S&OP) software and traditional demand planning solutions build a better plan, the challenge in today's volatile environment is that the plan will never be completely right. With this in mind, companies must now combine demand planning with a strategic capacity to monitor and respond to daily changes inside the sales and operations planning horizon. A monthly S&OP cycle alone will not yield optimal performance—excellence comes from monitoring and adjusting the portions of your S&OP that present unexpected variance as soon as it happens.

As a result, demand management and customer service decision makers need to:

Increase collaboration with customers to gain a consensus on true demand
Enhance demand sensing to quickly spot misalignments with the current state of supply
Drive more profitable responses by shaping demand and rapidly allocating finished goods supply accordingly
Respond quickly and confidently to the customer with an order promise date, and monitor that promise until it is fulfilled

Gone are the days of sequential demand planning and supply chain planning processes that operated in batched silos. Kinaxis RapidResponse meets the demand management challenges of today's manufacturers by ensuring an integrated demand andsupply planning and response management process.