Demand Planning & Forecasting
It all begins with an accurate forecast
Great demand plans are driven by data and business intelligence, not guesswork and gut feel
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Demand plans you can trust
Optimity’s Demand Planning software provides everything you need to create accurate demand plans, ensuring that your supply chain performs predictably and profitably.
The solution combines powerful statistical forecasting techniques with smart, intuitive collaboration tools and insightful analytics.
- Statistical forecasting
- Demand Collaboration
- 'What-if?' analysis
- Manual adjustments
- Promotions
- Insight
Intelligent prediction
Optimity eliminates the heavy lifting from your demand planning process. The software quickly analyzes your historical sales and consumption data, identifying trends, seasonality, outliers, and intermittent demand. Using Intelligent Prediction, Optimity automatically selects the best forecasting algorithm for each SKU.
Full flexibility and configurability are provided for the users. Planners can change algorithms and adjust historical data to fine-tune the statistical forecast at any point in time.
Get aligned with consensus forecasting
Optimity’s collaborative platform allows your team to refine the demand plan through manual adjustments and overrides.
Promotions and events, competitive intelligence, or perhaps a known supplier issue – all this and more can be incorporated into the demand plan for maximum accuracy. Every change or workflow approval/rejection is logged and made visible in real-time through the collaboration dashboard as you move towards a final consensus forecast.
Test and compare scenarios
Ever wondered what impact a new retailer contract or sales channel would have on your business? Or what different price points would mean to sales volumes and gross profit?
With Optimity’s demand forecasting tool you can quickly find the answers by running “What-if?” scenarios to test and compare the expected outcomes.
Any level, any horizon
Optimity gives you complete flexibility to model product and forecast data. Flexible attributes can be used to analyze, filter and make changes to your forecasts at any level – top-down, bottom-up and middle-out, ensuring the integrity of the data.
You can quickly detect and adjust trends and seasonal patterns. You can also work simultaneously with multiple planning horizons and planning buckets daily/weekly/monthly/etc. With Optimity you will never be short of options to represent the demand for your products.
Advanced promotion management
Optimity offers powerful planning functionality for sales promotions, product introductions, phase-ins, and phase-outs. This ensures that your forecast is as accurate as possible before being released for stakeholder review and sign-off.
Using machine learning, the software analyzes the outcome of historical events and evolves the plan over time. This built-in intelligence greatly improves forecast accuracy, helping to minimize surplus inventory and determine the optimal product mix. A promotion dashboard ensures that you remain in control throughout the full lifecycle of the activity.
Understanding your demand
The Demand Forecaster interface is intuitive and ultra-flexible. Dashboards can easily be configured and pivot table functionality allows instant access to data in every form. The ability to analyze and draw meaningful conclusions about your demand is virtually unlimited.
You can quickly compare both baseline and adjusted forecasts with actual demand to detect areas in need of attention. The tool highlights exceptions and exposes underlying trend, seasonal and cyclical demand patterns to make life easier for your planners.
Solution features
What our customers are saying
With more trustworthy demand plans, we can not only serve our customers better with less stock, but we can also plan our sourcing to get better prices.Löfbergs Jerker Friberg, Logistics Manager
Our forecast accuracy is now close to 80%. This is a huge improvement on the 35% we came from. The business now trusts the forecast and we’re all singing the same tune.Trelleborg Mattias Borén, Logistics Manager
Our plans have become much more accessible and dynamic and we can already see improved communication across our planning teamOrkla Patrik Paulsson, Supply Chain Planning Manager
We can now make forecast adjustments at any level and it automatically filters through. With Excel spreadsheets and our legacy ERP, this was something we simply couldn’t do. It’s a huge time saver for us, giving us a much better picture of demand.Hirsch Industries Jeff Braaten, Director of Supply Chain and Data Analytics