solutions for your business challenge demand management

Increasing Customer Expectations Driving Demand Volatility

Your competitors are a click away. No matter what business you're in, you're likely facing increasing customer expectations, declining customer loyalty and an overall increase in demand volatility. Customers have more options from global competitors and have more avenues to compare, get opinions and negotiate pricing than ever before. And, as you seek new growth in overseas markets, you often face local, entrenched players with greater brand awareness.

While statistical forecasting based on past history still plays a role as an input into the demand planning process, manufacturers today need greater tools to collaborate more closely on demand with their largest customers and sense true demand at the point of sale. These more demand-driven data points need to be supported by a quick consensus forecast process that pulls all the inputs together and ensures all stakeholders have timely information on the changing demand situation.

Armed with a more accurate view of demand, demand management processes can begin aligning and balancing demand with supply close to real-time in order to quickly determine where problems exist and take immediate action to address them. This requires closer collaboration between the demand and supply sides of your business than in the past given the increasing expectations of the market. Gone are the days of sequential demand planning and supply chain planning processes that operated in batched silos. Today's imperative is for a collaborative and integrated demand-supply planning process supported by proactively monitoring and rapid response to deal with unplanned changes to the plan.

Demand Management Supports a Demand-Driven Supply Network

Since it's true that you can't plan the customer, demand-driven leaders are implementing processes, supported by appropriate tools, to ensure their supply networks are pulled by demand. These demand management practices enable greater demand sensing and the creation of demand shaping and other strategies to constantly align demand and supply.

Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ includes demand management capabilities to

• facilitate forecast creation,
• foster demand collaboration with customers,
• develop a consensus forecast,
• conduct trend analysis to easily spot anomalies requiring attention,
• draw immediate attention to misalignments between projected and/or true demand and actual supply and
• quickly develop action plans for dealing with such unplanned events and misalignments.

RapidResponse uniquely meets the needs of today's demand management process — both in terms of developing the plan and developing rapid and profitable responses to plan deviations as they occur. RapidResponse supports demand management with solutions for

• sales and operations planning (S&OP) support,
• order promising,
• order changes,
• forecast changes,
• supply disruptions,
• supply allocations,
• operations performance monitoring and alerting,
• multi-enterprise supply chain visibility,
• new product introductions,
• inventory reduction and rationalization and
• customer collaboration.

Follow the link to learn more about the business value that RapidResponse delivers to your demand management and customer service teams and the value to IT.