Demand Planning & Forecasting
Plan and Forecast Changes in Sales and Business Volumes
Predicting demand, with sufficient lead time, is critical in for financial, resource, and general business planning. Underestimating demand can be just as or even more costly than overestimating: the former leads to lost sales and rushing to deliver sales while the latter leads to wasting products or resources.
Demand Planning enables planners to use the past to help in accurate forecasting. Through analysis of existing data patterns we help model customer retention, growth, revenue and transaction patterns to form a baseline forecast. This can then be modified to adjust and drive your forecast across multiple scenarios. Our solutions provide time sensitive models incorporating both automated predictability and human judgment, critical for sales teams, operations management, and the finance function.
Let us show you how we can deliver significant savings and efficiency in your Demand Planning process
smart forecasting
Forecasting demand can consume significant effort, so it is important to focus on the most important and impactful products and customers, while leaving automated tools to project 80% of the volume that might only correspond to 20% of sales. We make it easy for sales teams to collaborate, leveraging historical data and integrating with field staff or customers to improve precision of forecasts.
measuring and improving forecast accuracy
Improve forecast accuracy by measuring it - by team, by product, or by customer. Determine if your forecast accuracy is sufficiently timely, based on the lead time for each product type. Track improvements in forecast accuracy and share learnings for improving accuracy over time.
integrate with salesforce
If you are using a CRM system such as salesforce.com, create greater visibility to forecasts and the impact on future revenues and costs by integrating that data - live - with Anaplan. We can help link these two leading tools and create a single portal for sales management and integrated business planning.
Planned Demand Case Study
Excelitas Technologies Corp. is a global technology leader focused on delivering innovative, customized solutions to meet the lighting, detection and other high-performance technology needs of OEM customers.
Working with Excelitas' sales, IT, and operations teams, BetterVu helped develop a forecasting model on the Anaplan platform that migrated the company away from dependence on a CRM-driven sales solution and thousands of standalone spreadsheets. Now, Excelitas enjoys a cloud-based demand or sales planning solution that's both scalable and easy to manage by its business end-users.
- Sales forecasting with statistical capabilities for over 20,000 parts to over 10,000 customers
- Statical analysis now guides sales forecasts, manufacturing and delivery, helping meet customer needs more effectively
- Easy access to additional data presented in clear dashboards
- Significant time savings in forecasting process
Excelitas Technologies' CIO Amit Shah shares how his company worked with BetterVu to implement Anaplan for Demand and Sales Planning to achieve better flexibility, agility, and speed.
““Our new Anaplan forecasting model delivers significant time savings for our sales teams, allowing them to focus on outliers while further statistical analysis provides operations with confidence in building quantities by SKU. In only 9 weeks, the BetterVu team was able to create a dramatically improved sales forecasting tool that leverages historical data to create a statistics-based go-forward game plan for all of our manufacturing sites and SKU’s.””