Collaborative Demand Planning with Cloud based Demand Planner

Demand planning across an organization requires marshalling a wide range of data like historical sales data, promotions data and data for cause and effect analysis. In order to make the forecast realistic and practical, planners tweak the forecast numbers with their judgemental forecast. Most of this data resides in spreadsheets and therefore building a consensus with multiple stakeholders across multiple geographies holding on to multiple versions of the data becomes a very complex, error-prone and time-consuming activity. Moreover, rapid introduction of new products calls for a new approach to forecasting for New products. Saddle Point offers a cloud based demand planning platform that addresses all these issues. The cloud based Demand Planning systems gives a single shot view of data to all the stakeholders and thereby can overcome data visibility limitations. By using industry standard forecasting algorithms, it also improves the forecasting accuracy drastically by finding hidden patterns in the data. The solution can also aggregate and disaggregate the data at multiple levels so that the forecasting can be done at the required planning level and then passed on to the downstream applications at an execution level. Industry standard algorithms for New products also helps in forecasting for products with no sales history. Promotions that can change the forecast numbers can also be planned and impact of the promotions can be embedded in the final forecast. Additional qualitative and quantitative information about the sentiments of the products and the competitor’s products in social media also helps in tweaking the judgemental forecast numbers and helps in making informed decisions.