Demand Forecasting Solutions

The Planvisage Demand Planning has many functional attributes, features, and benefits for client companies.

• Managing demand is structured to support the needs of all users through a unique set of hierarchical and parallel hierarchical structures to facilitate marketing’s task to manage market segments
• Merchandising with departments, classes, sub-classes, SKUs or any other structure used
• Sales with categories, regions, and customers
• Operation’s with product families, groups, and lines
• Naturally this allows for flexible slice-and-dice capabilities by rapidly accessing and viewing data and making adjustments at aggregate or detail levels, benefiting each user community’s need
• Planning can be in days, weeks, months, quarters, and years

Planvisage uses the powerful R statistical forecasting engine incorporating the best time series techniques available anywhere worldwide, including the following algorithms:

• Arima
• Auto Arima
• Auto Exponential Smoothing
• Auto Regression
• Croston
• Exponential Smoothing
• Holt Winters Smoothing
• Simple Moving Average
• Weighted Moving Average
• In addition, users have the option to add their own algorithms

Demand Planning Benefits

1. To support each functional area within the organization to view data supporting the way they work
2. Unlimited number of hierarchies and parallel hierarchies to suit the needs of the most demanding users
3. Merchandisers group product into departments and sub-departments to support their area of control
4. Buyer/Planners review product in aggregate and detail prior to release to suppliers or the plants
5. Operations review data by product group and family tied to production lines
6. Sales personnel reviews sales by customer by product category, or product category by customer
7. Sales managers interrogate the total effort of his or her team in detail or aggregate
8. Forecast adjustments made top-down, bottom-up, middle-out
9. Data viewed in units, cost, selling price, margin, volume, weight, and percentages making up aggregate
10. Aggregates not stored but calculated on the fly providing greater flexibility ensuring data accuracy at all times
11. Product ranking from the most to least critical by cost, selling price, margin, and/or volume
12. Product ranking from high to low frequency of demand
13. Product analysis groups the most critical items with highest demand frequency to laser focus on what is important
14. The industry leading R forecasting engine provides high quality predictions allowing for a reduction in safety inventory
15. Detailed forecasting supports detailed budgeting and performance measures showing actual sales to forecast and budget
16. Performance measurements allows for accountability and responsive corrective action
17. Graphical displays where a picture is worth a thousand words
18. Dual forecasting graphs, one sequential, the other stacked to immediately see trend and seasonality
19. Suppression allows linking of old to new items to provide meaningful history for effective forecasting of new product