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demand management and customer service
Improve Demand Management and Customer Service to Drive Revenue Growth
Increasing competition combined with decreasing customer loyalty create a critical need to drive improvements in demand management and customer service.
While sales and operations planning (S&OP) software and traditional demand planning systems build a better plan, the challenge in today's volatile environment is that the plan will never be completely right. With this accepted truth, companies must now combine demand planning with a strategic capacity to monitor and respond to daily changes inside the sales and operations planning horizon.
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 and
- drive more profitable responses by shaping demand and rapidly allocating finished goods supply accordingly.
Kinaxis™ RapidResponse™ meets the demand management challenges of today's manufacturers by delivering solutions for forecast management, order fulfillment and sales and operations planning:
- Enhance demand planning by considering all new forecast inputs and create and maintain an accurate consensus forecast that drives the supply chain to build the correct products.
- Make required adjustments to finished goods supply to best meet your revenue, inventory and customer satisfaction goals.
- Adjust supply allocations and/or other supply commitments as required.
- Respond quickly to the customer with an order promise date.
- If the current order commitment cannot be met, respond to the customer with a revised fulfillment plan.
- Determine if customer forecast or order changes are viable and, if not (e.g., not possible or has an unacceptable impact on the business) work with the customer to find a mutually agreeable compromise.
- Notify forecast providers of forecast consumption variances that are significant enough to warrant a restatement of their forecast.
Benefits include:
- improved forecast accuracy,
- superior responsiveness to customers,
- early Identification of supply/demand misalignments, including:
- Unscheduled and late orders
- Critical supply changes
- Significant over/under consumption
- rapid and comprehensive evaluation of multiple resolution alternatives,
- enhanced visibility to impact on revenue, inventory and customer service metrics enabling informed decisions and actions,
- improved understanding of changes in the context of the trend and
- an ability to manage to plan despite variability.
